(Picture of grant owning this PCB)
Today, I went over to Grant's house and we started to build the hobbycnc control board. We put Grant's fancy soldering iron to work on the PCB. For the most part he was doing the soldering, and I was ensuring component placement based on the schematic and instructions from the kit. What was nice, was that the board was clearly and neatly ordered/organized. I did solder a few components just for good measure, and to remind myself how fun it can be. I see it as a miniature TIG welder without the annoying foot pedal.
(I'm soldering on a few parts just to make sure I can still do it; and I can yay!)
If I build another CNC I will seriously consider using this company again. The only two shortcomings that i forsee with this board is the lack of opto-isolation (although troy believes he has a fix for this), and secondly the lack of high voltage so we can't overdrive the stepper motors much. While this board can only go to 36V the Gecko Drivers can go to 80V, although the nice thing about this board is that it is almost all contained on this board.
So we built almost all the board, with exception to some of the logic chips. The reason is you want to test the board for solder bridges and continuity before applying current and voltage that could potentially damage the expensive logic chips. Once you are sure your board is functioning properly with the powersupply connected you can install the logic chips.
Given that we didn't purchase a powersupply yet we could not finish off the board completely. This is because Troy and Grant were going to explore the option of fabricating a powersupply from old parts from a microwave power supply. From the documentation it looks like we need an 18A powersupply; at this point I don't know if it's okay for us to exceed that, although my gut says its fine.
Here's a website with some good information about building or buying a powersupply http://www.solsylva.com/cnc/power_supply.shtml
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