Don't be put off by all the technical chat on this list - EMC2 is basically simple to use once you have it adapted to your machine but, as Brian says, that is common to all the cnc machine controllers. For stepper motors you can start off like I did with simple ( in my case, home made ) drivers built around the L297/L298 chipset which will drive motors up to 2A in half-step mode quite happily and probably do all you want. There are several sellers of such drivers on Ebay - just make sure you get parallel port drivers. As you develop your cnc skills you may want to change to microstepping drivers or even servo motors and drivers but this will be way down the road if it happens at all. Once you get your drivers and motors set up, you can experiment with them using one of the ready-made configurations in EMC2 and then just tweak that to get the best performance out of your kit. There are a lot of people on this list who will freely give you advice on any problems you encounter. One thing I would suggest is that you look at CamBam software which gives the easiest way to convert CAD drawings into G-code for a beginner - I think there is still a free version of the program...
The difficulties with CNC are the same whichever system you use and are not related to the machine or the software which directly drives it ( EMC2, Mach3 or whatever), they are almost always related to your ability to visualise what you want the machine to do and translate that into a G-code script. Every CNC driver software has a few quirks which you will have to learn but EMC2 is probably the most 'industry standard' of all the 'hobby' type software and the fact that a number of people on this list use it to run factories and healthy businesses shows that it is capable of doing pretty much anything you want it to without the need for costly upgrades. Buy some motors and drivers, install EMC2 (which is much easier than it looks ) and have fun..... -- Best wishes, Ian ____________ Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK "The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R)AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today-http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-com _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
