James Stanley

Posts tagged 'cnc'

First steps into CNC machining »

Mon 5 October 2020

I have bought a "6040" CNC router, and have been getting to grips with how to use it. This journey started with converting the machine to Grbl because I'm not interested in running proprietary software. Once Grbl was all working correctly, I clamped a small piece of plywood to the bed, fitted a 2mm end mill and made my first cuts, manually "jogging" the tool position using the buttons in the UGS interface. Read more »

How to convert a 6040 CNC machine to Grbl »

Wed 30 September 2020

The 6040 CNC machine comes in 2 flavours: parallel port and USB. I don't have a parallel port on the laptop I was intending to operate it with, so I chose the USB option. This is possibly a "mistake" as the USB option uses a proprietary USB interface board which is only compatible with Mach3 and therefore only compatible with Windows. But now that I've got it set up with Grbl, I think I prefer this system to what I would have with a parallel port controlled by LinuxCNC. Read more »