Freesteel Blog » Arduino powered mini machine tool

Arduino powered mini machine tool

Saturday, April 26th, 2014 at 7:50 am Written by:

A mere 9 years after we first tried to use our own mini-machine tool — which Martin wants to make sure everyone understands he did get working (shortly before it broke) — it’s been brought out of the cupboard and fitted with some proper electronics in the form of an Arduino controller by the DoESLiverpool Italian intern, and is showing signs of life.


The part of this kit that gave me the most surprise was the GRBL G-code parser code that ran on the Arduino. Look at the amount of software crammed onto that thing! Watch out Hurco and Heidenhain, your days are numbered. Soon all your industrial equipment will be deader than a Vax VMS.

My favourite function in the GRBL code is report_realtime_status() which prints a line of the form

<idle WPos:10.999,-0.5,9.1>

Yes, it’s the current position of the tool while it is running.

I immediately wrote a threading Python program to drip tool motions into the Arduino interspersed with the “?” command to invoke this realtime status to find out where the position currently had got to. Eventually this could become the principle behind a combined probing, cutting and dynamically feed-backing CAM system — something that cannot be implemented on industrial machines today due to their batch-work nature and one-way post-processing valve filter. For more, see earlier post on the feedback in the cnc drive configuration.

While writing an internal rant about why it’s okay to machine triangles, when some CAM systems claim to be “more accurate” because they locate their cutter positions against the analytic geometric surfaces themselves, I came to an important observation: the point nodes of the toolpath as defined in the G-code file are of no significance to the total cutting process, which continues along the straight lines between the nodes. All these cutting positions on the lines between are never on the accurate surface, so getting the zero dimensional finite set of node positions exactly right doesn’t make a difference.

2 Comments

  • 1. HDH replies at 6th May 2014, 8:57 pm :

    Maybe you guys can try with a industrial controller. For instance Heidenhain using RemoTools SDK or even TNCcmd can give the same functionality, then acceptence in the market would be higher… maybe

  • 2. Julian replies at 9th May 2014, 7:14 am :

    An industrial controller will have less functionality because we cannot improve it ourselves.

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