Before continuing with the explanation of the construction of the CNC we make a small detour by explaining its first use: writing, more precisely, writing and drawing 😋

The idea of “getting it written” had a multiple purpose:

• test the functionality of the various assembled components;
• measure its degree of accuracy;
• verify the correctness of the code.

The first drawings were more than anything else simple geometric figures. Sometimes even nested and very close together so as to be able to test how precise the CNC could be. The theoretical maximum precision that the machine should be able to reach is 1.25µm, even if currently the structural limits do not allow such resolutions.

Afterwards, after verifying that the machine was able to do its job accurately, I tried to make it draw real pictures and photos. The result was amazing!

I first tried it with a photo (as shown in the video above) and despite a few minor programming errors, which caused the writing to skip a few pixels, the result was very good indeed.

Obviously the machine doesn’t do everything on its own 😋 behind each movement there is a program (which runs on Raspberry) that, after analyzing the image to be drawn, sends signals to the CNC motor drivers which then is able to “move” and reproduce the chosen image.

The next article will be a bit geeky. I’ll show in more detail the part about the program and the code that was written to control the CNC.

Console.WriteLine("See you soon!!");