When my children were growing up I used to tell them that "Experience is a difficult teacher; she gives the test first and the lesson afterwards". I have found frequently throughout my career that I tend to learn the most when I fail. Mistakes are annoying and often...

I'm delighted to share that we just had the 1,000th download of our DIY CNC plans! I have such fun with my home-built machine that I wrote-up the plans, documented all the dimensions and assembled it into 72 pages of instructions! If you're looking to get into CNC...

One of the things I like to use my DIY CNC router for is to make PC boards using the isolation routing technique. My latest prototype is Isolation routed PCB with solder mask for an opto isolator board to be used with the HobbyCNC Pro when the user experiences "false...

I've started using checklists. A few nights ago I made a small, careless mistake and wrecked one of my nice 60 degree milling bits (at $14 a pop). My 'favorite' mistakes include: restarting LinuxCNC and forgetting to reload my program forgetting to connect the probe...

Making sure your stepper motor wiring is robust and secure is critical. Most (all?) stepper motor driver instructions include the warning "do not connect/disconnect motors while power is applied". Curious why? A brief-yet-incomplete intro to stepper motors is...

I recently assembled 5 PRO 4-axis boards. I'm pretty careful. I follow directions. I am quite familiar with the boards. Only 60% (three out of five for you non-math types) worked first time! Oh the shame.  Careful(er) visual inspection revealed the problems: One...

Had an interesting tech support problem last week. The customer was measuring wrong voltages all over his HobbyCNC board. The 5 Volt test point measured 4.85 Volts. The test point should be between 4.95 and 5.05 Volts (5 Volts +/- 1%). The output of the LM317HV should...

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 stepper motors, however, but that is...

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...