First CNC cut

I recently got my Zen Toolworks CNC machine built and hooked up using stepper drivers and breakout board from Probotix. Today I did my first cut! I used EMC2 and cut a spiral into a small piece of plastic.

I still need to add limit switches and figure out how to make my own designs to cut, but at least it works.

Assembling my Parallax Digital I/O Board

I recently got a Parallax Digital I/O Board. It comes in kit form. So you have to solder all of the parts into place, but it is all through-hole. Here's most of the parts before I started. I have 8 relays not shown in this picture.

And here's the finished product. Sorry, no pictures of it during assembly.

Top view. I think this is a really cool looking board.

Bottom view. You can see that I am not an expert at soldering, but I got the job done. I've done some basic testing and it all appears to be working fine.

More Parallax wood platform robot fun

Just a quick update to point you at another video I just uploaded.

More Parallax wood platform robot fun

I added a IR detector and an XBee module. They're on a breadboard for now. Just so I could get it functioning. I coded it so I could drive the robot around using a tv remote and it reports move and turn commands back to my PC via XBee. I have another XBee module hooked up to the PC via USB.

The wood platform robot is alive!

I finally got the wood platform robot running today. This is an picture of the top of it. You can see the 10 PING))) sensors, the 20x4 LCD display, and I have a 7.2v R/C car battery powering the MSR1 board.

Here's the bottom. You can see the 2 HB-25 motor controllers and the 12v battery that is powering the motors. I'm currently holding the 12v battery in place with a large zip-tie, but I want to figure out something better.

I put a video of the first run of this robot on youtube here.

So, I have been slacking a bit on updates here. Part of it is because it's rained the last 2 weekends so I couldn't work on the backyard project, and I haven't done as much on the chainmail as I would like so I didn't want to do an update with only a little more on it. I have also been working on a new project (CNC machine) that I will post an update on tomorrow.