After years of piling up and hording seemingly useful junk we have finally collected the right pieces of junk to make something useful. The goal is to assemble the pieces we have into a 3 axis engraver to cut metal business cards. Since the budget for this project is very low, most of the parts are from scrap. The controller is open source and from LinuxCNC and runs on a PC loaded with Ubuntu Linux. The drives and motors are all steppers. The spindle is yet to be determined, but will probably be a Dremel mounted to the Z axis.
The LinuxCNC controller uses the parallel port in the PC to command the stepper motors. The port on the mother board of the PC was a 3.3V model and my drives need TTL levels, so I had to order and install a 5V parallel port. It took a bit to configure, mostly because I didn't know of a direct method for testing the Linux configuration. After a couple hours of hacking I found a combination of commands that got the parallel port working. We jogged one of the motors and called it a day.
