(04-26-2015) When life gives you lemons ...or a broken neon sign...

I bought Jody a neon sign for his birthday, but it arrived broken.  The seller was really cool and refunded the purchase, so I could by a replacement neon sign for Jody, but we still had the old broken sign and weren't sure what to do with it.  Jody had the idea to paint it with ultraviolet paints and shine a black light on it - and here is the result.

(04-02-2015) CNC building

I wired up the Arduino to the three motor drivers last night and mounted them to a cutting board to isolate them from the metal casing of the CNC machine.  The next step is to find power inside the CNC that I can use to power the motors and wire the motors into the controllers.

The Arduino is using three big easy driver motor controllers, and the software on the Arduino is grbl for interpreting g-code and sending pulses to the motor controllers.

I'm sure that I will need to place a fan, and possibly some heat sinks, to cool the motor drivers, as well as figure out a way to keep the wires to the motors from breaking from the motion of the CNC bed.  I also need to look into calibrating the g-code output to have the correct scale on this machine.  I have a few issues to figure out, but hopefully I'll have a functional CNC soon.