Finally after many years I have helped put together a decent CNC machine. My mate Tyson recently purchased a Widgitmaster Midi router, and I supplied the PICSteps and some motors. After much fiddling about we have a really decent router (albeit a little smaller than we'd like, but that'll be fixed on the next machine :)

Release Firmware V2.0 today.

I've made two versions, one with a motor current timer and the other without. Also the LMD18245 bug has been worked-around and now the motor should be silky smooth in both directions. The bug was a pesky thing to figure out, but now the curves for both directions are correct and the direction switch is fixed to deal with a silicon bug in the LMD18245.

Finally sat down and figure out the new torque curve adjustments. Be interested to see what torque and performance people get with this firmware. Thanks to Henrik (mk2lehe @ http://www.cnczone.com/) for the information.

It took a little longer to figure out than I originally though, namely because it was 11pm and my brain wasn't working fully.

Anyway let me know how it all goes.

Terry has been busy building his own wind turbine to power lighting in his garage at home. He's constructed the blades and most of the mechanical components using his home-made router driven by three PICStep drivers. You can check out his website at http://www.terry-is.f2s.com/ and his wind turbine website at http://www.build-a-windturbine.com/

You can also see Terry's router in action milling out one of his blades in this rather cool video.

Well after a few pokes from people, and the fact that it made good sense I've decided to change the way the interface on the PICStep was laid out. It's now fully compatible with PMinMO.com parallel port interfaces (opto and non-opto) which give you a better choice for interfacing to your PC. It's also allows you to mix and match the drivers with any of the drivers available that have compatible interfaces. Version 4 is otherwise identical to V3.1 (with only a small exception of the optional crystal capacitors that I added for people who don't use resonators), the only difference is the 10 pin interface header and the addition of the Mode jumpers on the driver rather than the break-out board. You CANNOT I repeat CANNOT use this version with ANY of my interface boards as they aren't pin compatible and you are likely to explode expensive components of you try! The interfaces you can use are :-

• 4 Axis PC interface
• 3 Axis PC OptoIso interface

Enjoy! (Oh and any contributions are graciously accepted!)

Finished the opto-isolated input daughter board for the opto output board. Needs a 5V supply from the output board, and a separate regulated 5V supply for the PC side.

I'll write more about how/where to get this later.

I've updated the user gallery a little. I've added a few more photos and things. Have a look see! You can contribute too by clicking on the little PayPal icon (man I'm starting to sound like dan@dansdata.com :)!

View the gallery!

Fixed a missing part that I forgot to put on the opto output board. Should be fully functional now.

Fixed the issues with the Version 3.1 PICStep design. Now have incorporated the status LED's onto the opto-isolated breakout board instead.

New breakout board is dual layer (sorry!) for ease of design. I plan to get some professionally made along with a few of the V3.1 PICStep's

To see the changes look at the top of this page!