I have just come across this hackspace/makerspace, I live local (Farnham) and will try to drop by at the next evening to introduce my self. I assume 18.00 on friday is the next meeting.
I’m interested all things mechanical and electronic but by no means an expert. Currently building a water-cooled pc/ media server. Having a rethink on the carpentry/ chassis construction. Recently decided get an arduino and jump in to programming it. I am not looking into building a CNC rounter just trying to decide now to go about controling it. arduino grbl shield, CNC xPRO controller or a something with a parallel port with an old desktop.
Interested to hear from you and the projects your doing.
First fo all, welcome to the space. Yes our next meeting is Friday (13/05/2016) 6pm-late.
We’ve got a lot of people with similar interests, in fact I’m typing up this reply on a water-cooled PC, and we have a few people with CNC routers too.
I’d definitely recommend coming along to this weeks’ meet-up if you can to introduce yourself in person and get a feel for what what makerspace is about, meet some of the members and share knowledge.
Hi Andrew,
I can recommend arduino uno or duemilanove (i.e. the basic arduinos) with GRBL firmware and running grblPanel on a windows PC. It worked just fine right away for me and has a been stable and faultless in operation.
(Various vids of it controlling my home made CNC are on Youtube under ‘DrunkCNC’).
I’ve controlled it from both a small laptop and an old desktop pc, however, I’m told that grblPanel requires some version of the .NET framework that requires at least windows 7 to run. I’ve only tried it on windows 7 so I have no personal experience of trying to use it with older OSs.
I wish you all the best with your creating!
Thanks for the advice on the cnc project Pete, it’s good to hear from someone that has some experience. Windows 7 is what I’m planning to use, go to know though as something I didn’t check.
Thanks for the quick reply, look forward to seeing you on friday.
I will try and bring the water-cooled pc with me. Its an unusual looking thing with only a psu fan for cooling.