On August 25th, I started tinkering with the software for the CNC machine.  (Actually started earlier on Saturday, Aug 23, without much success).  Went back to Stepperworld.com, from where I bought the stepper motors, and checked out their recommended settings.  It turns out that the control board they supplied works with KCAM, a freeware piece of software they provided with the motors.  On their website, they also have a list of the appropriate pin-settings (at the bottom of the page linked here) to control the stepper motors through the parallel port, via KCAM.

Note - when you install KCAM, it will provide to programs: KCAM3 and KCAM4.  The pin-settings and tutorial on Stepperworld appears to apply to KCAM3.

I put the pin-settings in, and tested it out.  Seems to work!  I can jog the motors, set the motor speeds, set the "home location", and have them return to their initial position after jogging them around.  I can also load a G-code file and have the motors obey it (I think - there seems to be a scaling issue between the path and the actual motion of the motors, which means they may prematurely reach their end of travel - I have to find out where that gets changed in the software).  I could also load a G-code file created with LazyCAM.  And since LazyCAM can read .DXF files, and I know we can create .DXF files from Solidworks or AutoCAD, then I -think- that means that most of the puzzle pieces are in place!  We just need to jiggle them down so all the parts fit snugly.

:-)

Please note - progress on the CNC project from June to August has largely been blogged about on the Lab Journal - the 'generic' Steampunk Lab blog.

Future efforts specific to the CNC project will not be posted there, but will be written about on this blog.

After we decided to get serious about CNC machining, I figured I'd start a blog to detail our efforts.  This will at least help to keep us organized, and may be helpful to other people who are trying to build their own CNC machines as well.