grbl, Windows XP and Boarduino

A quick note / tutorial to help anyone trying to find out the same information that I was!


I am looking to set up a CNC system and have chosen to go down the grbl route and use a boarduino. The first hurdle of getting grbl on to the boarduino using the hardware I have on my desk. A lot of sites made this sound a lot harder than it was in the talking about AVR programmers and all sorts


EDIT: The hex file supplied below has an error - the motor drive pin doesn't work. I have created a new HEX file which I will upload when I have tested it.


I have provided a summary after the jump:

Robot Gripper

I have designed a robot gripper for a Turnigy mini TG9e servo. A paypal link for the laser cut acrylic components is at the bottom of the page. The gripper is laser cut from 3mm and 5mm acrylic and bolted together with M4 16mm machine screws.

The servo arm is used to drive the gripper.

The green acrylic under the servo is the 5mm section. Make the bolts finger tight and adding a blob of superglue to the nuts helps keep everything solid.

The servo hooked up to a boarduino.

You will also need a small servo such as the Turnigy TG9e (I believe the TG9 will fit as well), 7x M4 16mm machine screws, 7x M4 nuts,14x M4 washers and a teeny tiny screw to attach the servo arm to the gripper (the ones with the servo are ideal)

The "wrist" has 2x 4mm holes but if you require something different just let me know when ordering.

Servos can be sourced here .
M4 hardware is available from all good hardware stores ;)
Instructions can be downloaded here.

Bluetooth Headset

Simple mod from last Saturday night (I really need to get out more!).

I have a pair of bluetooth headphones but unfortunately the headband is broken and one of the speakers is a bit dodgy so I decided to mod it to have a 3.5mm socket.

More after the break.

Fire Detector 2

So I set up the Chipkit Uno32 with the temperature sensor TMP36 from oomlout.com, installed the serial port monitor on the laser pc and tested the system. All fine so far.

Fire Detector

After Martins fire, and have a near miss myself I am planning to build a fire detection system for my laser. I am already building an Axolotl temperature sensor system (which I am logging at the moment) so when that is complete I will have a look at using a similar system for fire detection. Whilst the temp sensor is being finished I am going to log the temperature in the laser to see what sort of range I am dealing with. For this I am going to use the chipkit / arduino prototype for the Axolotl system and write something simple to monitor the com port on the PC.

I will strip the LED and buzzer off and hook up the temp sensor directly.

More details and code will be published when I have it hooked up.

Vinyl Cutter/Plotter Re-wiring

After I re-wired Braunston Ltd's vinyl cutter for the 5th time they finally admitted defeat and purchased a new one from CTR Lasers. This meant that I was free to mess around with the scrapped one.

Bus!

Recent commission - card bus / coach. Really simple design that will be branded up and possible personalised per recipient. It will be supplied flat to be constructed by the person receiving it so it had to be a simple tab and slot design.