To Shield or Not To Shield (your wiring)

Should you use shielded wire or not? I don’t use any shielded wire on my DIY CNC, and I haven’t had any noise or ‘phantom triggers’. I do notice interference (like a ‘fuzzyness’) on my computer monitor when I hit the power to my...

KiCAD, FlatCAM and milling slots in a PC Board

I needed a quick-and-dirty 36VDC unregulated linear power supply to drive some HobbyCNC boards on my test system. I wanted the bridge rectifier to mount directly to the PC board.  The beefy bridge rectifier that I had in my stock was the type with the large spade-type...

KiCAD and FlatCAM to isolation route PCBs

EDIT: I have documented the KiCAD to G-code process here: hobbycnc.com/pc_board_isolation_routing/ As a follow-up to my last post on Autodesk and Eagle, I did my first PCB isolation routing using the KiCAD and FlatCAM to LinuxCNC toolchain. I did schematic capture and...

Eagle and Autocad

One thing I use my DIY CNC machine for is milling PC Boards (it’s technically called “isolation routing”). This is fairly fast, inexpensive, accurate and uses zero nasty chemicals. I’d been using Eagle Schematic & PCB design software. Great...

What’s all this about BreakOut Boards (BOB)

A BreakOut Board – a BOB for short, takes an input, typically from a computer or a ethernet/USB-to-parallel converter and splits up the signals into individual pins. These pins are then wired to individual stepper driver boards.  Most stepper driver boards...