PrintNC, Huanyang VFD, Flexihal, and IoSender control.

[@rmholladay]

Looking at your channel it looks like you have built/used nearly all of the big DIY CNC names. Could you give your opinion on cost/effort to build/results of these machines?

[@tonyrichmond9428]

I don't know about that. Root is also pretty well known, and then there's Bob's CNC (which I guess is more of a kit). I guess there really aren't too many "big name" DIY CNCs. Most of them are kits like the OneFinity, Longmill, or Avid. I'll try to nutshell this for the machines I've built:

[@tonyrichmond9428]

MPCNC Burly - great starter machine, very capable, very flexible. Deprecated in favor of the Primo.

[@tonyrichmond9428]

MPCNC Primo - everything the burly is, plus some more efficient use of parts and space. Belt tensioning is fantastic, the core is elegant, but requires your printer to be dialed in...that's your perpendicularity. The trucks give people some trouble where the motors mount up(very thin mounting plate), but mine were serviceable and have given me no actual trouble. Biggest challenge for the MPCNC (all versions) is getting the legs right. If you build one, make a jig to get the placement square, and make a fixture to get all 4 leg corners mounted at the same height. You can compensate for parallelogram leg placement with dual endstops, but a pair of tubes for one axis are different lengths, the gantry is going to bind up, and you'll never get a flat wasteboard if your gantry has one leg out of plane. Totally worth the effort, though. Bang-for-the-buck KING imo. Only things I don't like is having to manage the wiring, find a place for the control board, and no dust collection available that won't take up some cutting room.

[@tonyrichmond9428]

MPCNC LowRider 2 - All I can say is that it's kinda slow. I had some build-quality issues that affected performance somewhat. The tubes hanging off the table got in the way of my desk drawers. I added Z endstops that actually made my life more difficult. Better to have identical blocks to rest the gantry on and set the height that way. Horrible to get a the tool for zeroing the Z (although the dewalt comes all the way out of the mount for tool changes), very little visibility of the work, and the mounting plate makes it very difficult to use clamps. Single motor offset from the center of the mounting plate lost steps on too many jobs for me, so I only built one. Dust collection is a plus, though. Deprecated in favor of the LR3.

[@tonyrichmond9428]

MPCNC Lowrider 3 - Absolutely love this machine. The one I videoed here belongs to a friend down the street, and I'm planning my own now. I was worried about the single stepper, but it seems adequate. We bogged the router down a little but never lost steps, so that seems like a great balance of power. Integrated dust control, logical wiring, control-board placement provisions, belts that won't catch trash, easy work holding and visibility...this thing has it all. Way more rigid than I would have expected it to be, although the gantry can still twist a little if pushed too hard. Also, scales up AND down very well - I'd rather have one of these than a primo at any size. Much much better than the LR2. Still, slower than some other options, but not slower than any options that are cheaper. If this existed 3 years ago, I probably wouldn't have built the PrintNC.

[@davidkal9083]

Hi! Do you know what type is this green connectors ?What size or pitch ? Thanks!

[@tonyrichmond9428]

Sorry, i don't. If I were guessing, I'd say they are molex, about 5mm. But there are so many different types and I'm such a rookie that I'm probably wromg. I'm sure you can go ask in the expatria discord. The project is open source on github, so maybe you can find an answer there, too.

[@davidkal9083]

thank you anyway!@@tonyrichmond9428

[@YourGirlSketchy]

hi I have a sister in-law with your same name who's also a carpender, is that you Toni its Sara?

[@tonyrichmond9428]

Well, it's "Tony", not "Toni"... I'm somebody's brother in law, but nobody's sister in law... and I'm no carpenter, just a dude who likes to tinker and build stuff. But I'm glad you stopped by. If you find her, let her know about this weird coincidence!

[@YourGirlSketchy]

🙂

[@drewnabobber]

You make it look way too easy.

[@tonyrichmond9428]

Thanks, but credit for this goes to expatria and the flexihal control board. Preflashed with grblhal and it was literally 2 wires from the board to the vfd, and 4 settings to change on the vfd, all listed on the printnc wiki. I can't remember if one of the settings was the communicating baud rate, but I did have to update that as well.