Starting project

After reading articles like this and this I’ve get idea to turn our mill also to CNC-machine. You can read from those good articles how to make it.They’ll tell it better than me. If you don’t read Germany I can let you know neater do I.
I’ve just took Arduino Uno (That was laying around in office), grblShield and couple of Trinamic NEMA-17 stepper motor (Not cheapest but they work ok with grblShield). So I was ready to rock.

Loooooong IDLE

Then I’ve take

WHILE(1)
  IF HAVE_TIME != YES THEN
    PRINT "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"
    SLEEP MONTH
  ELSE
    PRINT "Hello Doctor Falken, Do you want to play?"
    BREAK
  FI
ELIHW

Long IDLE and then I had little spare time so I started project and formulated CNC machine. It’s not as beautiful as those examples but it works good and it’s very accurate.

CNC machine ain’t robot

You are correct I just kind of robot. It does what GRBL (G-Code) says but it doesn’t function by itself. So next when I have more free R&D slots I’ll take webcam and OpenCV and start converting it to real robot that can function without me.

But but you didn’t tell how to get GRBL into Arduino UNO

Okay I’ll share this with you and just with you. Download HEX file from https://github.com/grbl/grbl. Then download Arduino RPMs and avr-dude from http://build.opensuse.org. You got to be on dialout-group in openSUSE to do this (Tune it from YaST2 groups & users position and re-login to it take effect). If you don’t have any other ACM (probably Modem or GPS device) devices in you machine you device location is probably ‘/dev/ttyACM0‘ and you also have to know which arduino programming version you have (Mine is 1.0.5). After that HEX goes in and Arduino blinks light and your robot is alive..

avrdude -C/usr/share/arduino-1.0.5/hardware/tools/avrdude.conf -pm328p -carduino -P/your/ACM/device/here -D -U flash:w:your_grbl_hex_here.hex

Now is time to listen Kraftwerks: We are the robots for few times..