If you’re searching for a small, benchtop CNC device for PCBs as well as light milling the ubiquitous Sherline CNC device is a great choice. There’s a issue with it, though: normally, the Sherline CNC controller runs off the parallel port. While a few of us still have a Windows 98 battlestation sitting around, [David] doesn’t. Instead, he developed a USB dongle as well as composed the software application to turn this small CNC into something usable with a contemporary computer.
First up, the hardware. The core of this develop is the rt-stepper dongle based around the PIC18F2455 microcontroller. With a bare minimum of parts, this chip converts USB into a parallel port for real-time control. It’s quick — at least as quick as the parallel port in the ancient laptops we have sitting around as well as plugs best into the CNC controller box for the Sherline.
The software application is where this truly shines. the application utilized to manage this dongle is a hack of the EMC/LinuxCNC job written in nice, portable Python. This application produces the step pulses, however the timing is maintained by the dongle; no real-time kernel needed.
There are a great deal of options available for a desktop CNC device produced routing copper clad board, wood, brass, as well as aluminum. The Othermill is great, as well as Inventables X-Carve as well as Carvey are much more than up for the task. Still, for something little as well as fairly cheap, the Sherline is well-regarded, as well as with this bit dongle you can really utilize it with a contemporary computer. inspect out the demo video below.