During the christmas vacation 2010/2011 I decided to start a new DIY (Do-It-Yourself) project and to build a CNC mill. I already owned 4 stepper motors, a kind of Dremel milling spindle and was aware of the EMC2 milling software project. The CNC mill should be able to mill wood, plastics, printed circuit boards and eventually aluminium front panels, and the expenses for material shall be as low as possible.

I started with the design of the stepper motor controllers and EMC2. The use of the L297/L298 stepper motor driver concept controlled by the parallel Port seems to be the easiest one, as a lot of people are using this for their mills. I quickly designed 3 controller boards, ordered the ICs and was able to test the EMC2 software together with the stepper motors a week later. The PCB was exposed and etched (Fe-3-Cl) by myself. An old computer power supply is used as the power supply.


After I verified the function of the stepper motor controller and the EMC2 functionality, I started to design the mechanical construction. I decided to use aluminium profiles because these are light-weight, stiff and easy-but-accurate to machine. Cheap aluminium profiles are found at the junk dealer/scrap metal merchant. Ball bearings, screws, nuts and washers have been ordered at a webshop. The stainless steel thread-rods for the three axis are from a local hardware store.

A first design of how the machine could look like was done as a 3D drawing in "freecad", a 3D technical GNU/GPL design tool.


Only with my fathers more than 40 years experience in mechanical designing and his highly educated tooling and fabrication skills, the cnc mill could be built straight forward without big hurdles and problems. About 4 month later our homemade cnc mill was ready for the first test.