Been on hold for the Texas summer - so hard to get out in that garage when it is 105 F out there... but I did recently acquire my very own drill press so things are moving along better. This is a total spam post - selling the phone that started it all: eBay listing for word.a.bot phone... It was a good ride.

Well after a few long evenings in the garage redesigning the Z axis and working through various problems I finally got back into CAMBAM to generate some 2D tests - I'm a very pleased with the results thus far.  Precision seems to pretty good without much tweaking and all axisis are functioning properly!

X, Y .... Z?

Been a while, but I'm finally getting motivated again to keep the project moving - had to take care of a few "honey-dos" prior to moving forward.

Found a older computer (c.2004, Celeron 2.6ghz put a clean copy of XP) to push the GCode - will probably do the designing one of  my non-garage machines since this is just barely fast enough that I don't take my sledge hammer to it.

Got the power supply (Goodwill, thank you!) all wired up to the GRBL shield, flashed Arduino with 0.8 GRBL and have the X & Y axisis running great.  No binding or hang-ups.  Only issue thus far is with the anti-backlash springs, which I don't think are quite big enough.  They are getting hung-up on the treads, so I left them out for now.

Put some good time in last night with the Z axis - the more I work with this particular design, the more I realize that it is extremely easy for the small errors to add up into a machine that may not have the accuracy I'd like, especially when I don't have a lot of precision tools to build.  A learning experience before moving on to bigger and better.

Progress Check

Have the X axis all wrapped up and the Y axis all set as well - just working on the carriage supports, which, are a royal pain to get all lined up and the holes accurate.  Also, having some trouble finding all the necessary hardware (Homedepot doesn't seem to know that M3 screws are actually produced).

Very excited to actually get a motor mounted (this week?)

Progress Check

Got some good time to get the holes all drilled for most of the major parts.  Time to get square.

Word-a-bot is Getting Some Upgrades

With some new (to me) NEMA 17 steppers, some updated GRBL and a few ideas from MYDIYCNC.COM, Wordabot is about to get some vital upgrades. More to come!