CNC Machines First Production

Tonight our CNC showed signs of life. We attached a pen and drew images of circuits, skulls, and Road Runner. The CNC Router was the first project we started working on and it has taken many nights of team work to get to this point. There is still a lot more to do. We started working on the Z-Axis tonight and once that is finished we will have to take most of the machine apart and make fine adjustments to make it as precise as possible. After that there is the long process of mastering the 3D Software.

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Can I Get an Update?

I know I’m bad with these photo updates. Mostly because I am having too much fun at the Hackerspace that I just forget to take photos. I took a lot more photos than these but it turns out that my flash card was bad and my camera never let me know. I’ll try to recover those images later.

So, last week we finished building the Y axis for our CNC project and we talked about launching a payload into near space. Before that we built a Corstarch Monster for Electronica Fest and we were messing with some PIC kits (microncontrollers) using speakers and LCDs as outputs. Now that I have a new phone which actually takes decent photos (the above were taken with my Palm Pre) I will probably be able to share more of our hackerspace with those of you who don’t like to leave your computer chair.

Can’t complain about laptop issues!

First, we would like to thank Loyala College in Maryland for their generous donation of a IBM Laptop.

We were all very excited to learn that the IBM laptop came with a built in parallel port. However, after a few hours of hacking and puting the stepper motor on the CNC we found out that the laptops port is not compatible with our CNC. So we will need to resort to a desktop for now. We loaded the laptop with Windows and Linux and I’m sure we will find a million other uses for it.

X Axis is Finished, Now we take it apart!

I could not help but smile really big during yesterdays meeting. There was the real feeling of a hackerspace with Miles building a prop gun, all of us pitching in on the CNC Machine and a few of us tearing into a work related project of mine. Then to top it all off Logan from Baltimore SDIY stoped by and demonstrated his projects. We all had a great time.

Now we need to take th CNC apart and paint it.