Raspberry Pi enthusiasts looking for a new project to keep them busy this weekend may be interested in a Raspberry Pi CNC plotter created by Stratos Botsaris. The code for the Raspberry Pi CNC plotter has kindly been made available to download via GitHub using the link below.
“I had seen people on the internet creating and using CNC plotters and always wondered how these machines work. I was mainly interested in way the CNC machine translates the G-code instructions into movement that drives the stepper motors. I wanted to find out the internal workings of this.
I started experimenting with one stepper motor with a Raspberry Pi,” he says. “Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have salvaged one stepper motor from an old printer and another one from an old scanner. In the beginning I had to find out how stepper motors work and how to connect one to Raspberry Pi.
Then I tried to drive the stepper motor by writing a small program in Python and run it on Raspberry Pi. Once I managed to make this work, I got very excited and this gave me the push to continue with controlling two stepper motors at the same time. This was the most tricky part because I had to find a way to move the two stepper motors in parallel if I ever wanted the CNC plotter to draw a diagonal line. I had been trying several algorithms in Python for a long time, but eventually the simplest one worked how I wanted.”
The code for the Raspberry Pi CNC plotter is now available to download via GitHub using the link below.