No More Bent Leads: IC Tubing Cutter

Avoiding Bent Pins Sometimes the answer is in the trash. The background: while assembling a batch of HobbyCNC PRO boards, I was noticing how neatly the 23-pin driver chip dropped into the PC board. Then I had one chip with one lead, just one, slightly out of...

HobbyCNC PRO Rev 2 Introduced

HobbyCNC PRO Rev 2! I’ve made a few changes to the popular HobbyCNC PRO board. Most of the changes are cosmetic or functional, but one in particular is a big departure from the Rev1 boards. What hasn’t changed: Roughly the same form factor (it is a little...

My brand new stepper motor won’t turn by hand!

Your Motor is Fine! Customer received some new stepper motors and found it very difficult to spin the shaft by hand. Naturally, the thought was the motors were ‘bad’. Normally, you can easily turn a stepper motor shaft by hand, and you can feel each of the...

Blown Chip #2

This is a very unusual chip to blow like this. Just like with the blown driver chip, damage like this indicates a LOT of power. But this chip is nowhere near any high voltages. The Diagnosis Assembly error? Nope. This was an assembled PRO board, so it was fully tested...

Experience is a tough teacher

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...

1000th DIY CNC Plan Downloaded!

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...