Rebuilt SpectraLight CNC Milling Machine

Rebuilt and installed a CNC machine in my apartment. It had been sitting in my father's shop collecting dust, because this machine originally operated off of a card that fits in your computer using an ISA slot. It didn't come with the machine, and I guess this is pretty common. You can still buy the card from Light Machines, but it cost $999.

So obviously we decided against that route in hopes that one day we would rebuild it our self with cheaper and easier to replace parts.

The other day I decided that I really wanted to get this working, and did the research to figure out how.

I wanted to use the G540 Gecko driver.

Found the Deepgroove system. It was nicely packaged.

Took the whole machine apart.

I could have used Mach3. It runs on windows, and I don't have any complaints about it. But I figured EMC2 running on Ubuntu would give me everything I need, and would have just as much of a learning curve. Plus it is open source and free.

It didn't take too long to configure the machine. After reading the manual, I had it up in running acceptably well in a few hours. I still want to do some fine tuning to maximize the potential of the machine.

As you can see it is working great.