DIY CNC Engraving Machine! Widget69

Folks, we're back. DIY CNC pneumatic engraving machine. Super excited. We started this project back in May. We didn't like the Y-axis and then we moved and then somebody fried their tiny G, my fault. We've made the improvements, we've rebuilt it. I think this stuff is awesome. This to me shows and proves you can do it, folks. Relatively inexpensive components. Some of them are new, some of them are from eBay. Modeled it up in Fusion 360. And folks, this is so cool to me I think it's fun, but it's also incredibly useful. We have this purpose-built, dedicated machine that's relatively inexpensive that solves a specific need for us, and it can be whatever it is for you. It can be etching, it can be engraving, it can actually have a spindle on it, it can be pick-and-place. It's just, I think this is so cool. There's a link below in the video description to the bill of materials. We're also going to do a separate video which you can click for here if you want to see a lot of detail into the project and actually some things where we need to improve. But by and large, it's a simple two-axis CNC machine. It uses two steppers with ball screws that convert motor rotary motion into linear machine motion. It happens to do it fairly accurately, again, for the task at hand or for the need that we have. Plenty accurate. And more importantly, we upgraded. The y-axis. To these thicker, linear bearings, and it's more rigid, which is really important for what we're trying to do, which is have that, maintain that gantry-style rigidity over a larger work area. Again, big, relatively big envelope for a machine that doesn't weigh but a thing. What I think is cool, too, is we've got these pneumatic cylinders, fairly easy to work with. Again, look at the bill of materials or watch the other video for detail on that. And we're controlling them through CNC. The G code through chili pepper. So when you type M8 and hit enter, they go down. When they hit M9, they come back up. But nobody wants to hand code this stuff. So let's take a look at how we actually make the part. We're using Fusion 360, which I like and we talk a lot about on our machining related videos. What's great about Fusion 360 is it's both CAD and CAM. And if you're a hobby user, Autodesk will let you use it and fully functional for free. So we have this shape, our logo. All that we did was went to WaterJet. It's a relatively new feature to Fusion 360. If you don't see it here, click on your name, go to Preferences, and under Preview, you'll see you have this option to try out the beta. That's key because it's going to let us control the M8 and M9. So all we had to do. We'll select our chains, really simple, and then hit post. For right now, it's giving us the wrong M-code. We're going to update this post processor that will automatically fix it, but it's actually pretty easy right now. We just have to do a replace. We find M50, which is in replace with M8, which turns the spindle on, and likewise M51 with M9 to turn the spindle off. We're using what's called Chili Pepper, a really cool open source or free online controller. So the way this works is we use CAD to create a part, like that's the shape of it. We use CAM to create the toolpaths around that shape. CAD and CAM, for us, are both in Fusion 360, and it puts outputs G-code. Well, you need something to read that G-code to send it to the TinyG. The TinyG is what controls the actual steppers, and it looks for that G-code to tell the steppers where to go. How we tell TinyG to work is that G-code file. All we've got to do is we take that file we just made, drag it right here. Tell it was millimeters that we did our CAD in and look at that. We've got our logo right there, ready to go. Let's engrave it.