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Assignments

Group assignment of Mechanical Design:

Design a machine that includes mechanism+actuation+automation

Build the mechanical parts and operate it manually

Document the group project and your individual contribution

Group assignment of Machine Design:

Actuate and automate your machine

Document the group project and your individual contribution

The objective of this week is to design and assemble the mechanical part of a CNC machine. To fullfil this assignment all group members shared task based on our background and expertise.

The idea is to make a CNC Router Machine with Laser Engraver. Our machine is designed to make the laser engrave in wood and opaque plastic, having an ATmega328P and the GRBL as machine automation basis. The machine axis are just the X and Y axis, which move a laser with power of 500mW 405nm.

Laser Assembly

We started by the frame assembly, this was done by cutting and putting together all mechanical parts of the CNC machine

Manually Test

After putting together all the necessary parts including mechanism, actuation and automation. We made a manually test to check if the gears and other parts are moving smoothly, we also tested the movement of the stepper motors, the objective was to verify if motors are not moving in the opposite directions and control their speed.

Individual contribution

In this assignment, I mainly focused on the integration between the software and the CNC board.

This was not an easy task because it was my first time to work on the CNC machine, I was supposed to read many tutorials from the internet. This tutorials was most helpful. Reference about diy laser using atmega 328p

Software Download & Installation

GRBL Software

Grbl is a free, open source, high performance software for controlling the motion of machines that move, that make things, or that make things move, and will run on a straight ATmega328P . If the maker movement was an industry, Grbl would be the industry standard. Source of the software

Uploading laser firmaware using xloader

To upload the firmware, I used the machine of my instructor because I failed to do it with my Mac computer, I was supposed to use a computer with windows OS, especially windows 10. Source of the firmware

Using xloader navigate where hex files(laser firmware is stored on my local computer)

Then upload firmware and choose nano as the main device

Then click upload button and wait until uploading is done

Finally, I used benbox laser controller software and I tested the machines with the image of Christmas tree and some word I typed in the software. And then I selected the serial port with which our laser CNC machines is connected to.

Testing Results

Here there are different output we got which shows that our machine is not well aligned but due to time constrains we decided to make calibration later after the fabacademy.

Download link

Mechanical & machine design