An Arduino shield built to bring your CNC project to life: easy enough to experiment with and robust enough to be the heart of your machine.

Originally constructed for the Shapeoko hobby CNC machine, and based on Bart Dring's original Buildlog.net design, this shield kit will allow you to drive your desktop CNC project's three axes motors with the included driver modules.

Electronics tend to be the last thing that gets done on a homebrew CNC. It can be a daunting way to finish out a project. This shield allows you to start at the beginning. It's a great way to get your electronics going, on the familiar Arduino platform, and let that inspire you to move on to building the physical structure as you desire--be it the ShapeOko or something of your own design

This shield routes power and signals to the 3 included Pololu A4988 motor driver modules which power the motors to respond to G-Code. The Arduino sketch used to interpret G-Code is GRBL (pronounced "garble") and it can be found at GRBL's github.

You will also need:

● Basic soldering skills and equipment

● An Arduino Duemilanove (with a 328 chip, not the older 168) or Uno and the requisite USB cable

● A power supply that puts out at least 50 watts of DC power between 8 and 30 volts is recommended--almost any old laptop power supply will work

● Your stepper motors; we recommend these 1.6 amp, 3 volt motors with a lot of torque; the drivers can also drive these Nema 23 motors that have almost twice the force

Features:

● 2 oz thick copper traces allows for superior power to motors with improved heat dissipation

● Microstepping can be configured via jumpers for full steps, 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x making accuracy on a tightly built machine to 0.003" or better--you won't find 16x microstepping on other boards

● Shield PCB and shield components are all RoHS compliant

● Extra fourth axis is available to drive a second Y-axis motor for extra wide gantries

● Power up to 2.0 amps per motor coil

● Easily and inexpensively replace individual driver chips, rather than having to desolder, should the need arise

● Includes driver chip heat sinks for improved performance!

● Automotive grade micro capacitors, high current rated terminal blocks, gold flashed contact pins--we kit things with top shelf components

Find build information and more resources at Reactive\Substance.

Video introduction and build tutorials are online.