CNC drilling machine - FINISHED!

With the new path finding routines in our CNC drilling software, and changes to the firmware to allow the user to manually jog the drill head up and down to get more precise alignment during initial set-up, we're finally happy to say that our cheapo CNC drilling machine is finally complete.
Or at least, complete to a state that we're happy to release for anyone else to have a go at making their own.

The last little part of the test was making sure that the machine could drill a PCB even when placed on the cutting bed at an angle. Here's a video showing exactly that:

The drilling is accurate enough for us now (there's still a little bit of play in the x-axis, but we seem to have done enough to remove/reduce any play in the y axis, even when the bed still needs to travel up-and-down in order to correct for the board being at an angle)

Here's the final board, as drilled in the video:

The holes on the bottom-right-hand edge may not be absolutely bang on, but they're good enough to make the board usable, and are about as accurate as you could get by drilling the board by hand. The photo seems to emphasise the amount of drift - it's probably less than 0.5mm away from the centre of the hole.

Having successfully completed a cnc drill test, we put the machine away!

We reckon our machine fulfills all the criteria set in the CNC drill challenge.

• You can load NC compatible drill files to operate the machine
• It cost less than £50 to build, completely from scratch with new (no salvaged) parts
• It's accurate to within 0.5mm (despite the dodgy cheapo stepper motors)
• The footprint is less than a sheet of A4 (in storage mode, it's about 210mm x 160mm)

It's been a long (and sometimes painful) journey, but it feels great to finally complete a project, not just to a point where it's working, but to be able to compare it to a list of criteria drawn up at the start, and to be able to tick every one off the list!

Along the way we were introduced to brushless motors and their servo-protocol control boards, created our own stepper motor control boards and our own USB-based protocol for moving them, and proved that rack-and-pinion gearing can be used just as successfully for CNCs as belt drives and leadscrews.

If we were to do the whole thing again?
Probably it'd look pretty similar. Maybe instead of a travelled bed-on-wheels we might use rails (similar to the x-axis) because there is a lot of play in the y-axis. But then again maybe not?

Any improvements?
Of course. Better stepper motors would be a great start. When energised, a stepper motor should have no movement in it at all - our steppers have 1mm-2mm of play because of the internal gearing. But then again, this does give us simple movement commands - no messing about with micro-stepping or any of that tricky stuff! We love the simplicity of the rack-and-pinion approach: belt-drives and leadscrews may be more popular, but we reckon we'd stick with ours.

The custom software is enough to make the device usable, but the protocol for sending x- and y- axis values is so simple that allow anyone else can write their own controller software. The latest firmware not only allows you to set a the number of steps to move in both x- and y- axes, but you can also now provide a "ratio" (for every three steps in x, move one in y for example). This means that if a vector line is broken down into enough parts, the machine could be modified to do simple milling - an idea that Justin from BuildBrighton is already working on!