Saturday, October 23, 2010

Saturday, overview of source materials and goals



So I've been reading all these fun posts on people making CNC laser cutters with nothing but some old printers, scanners and a CDROM drive. Being somewhat of a tinkerer myself, I decided to give it a go.


We've had a Canon MP530 break on us and had an old Lexmark and HP sitting in storage as well. So I dragged them into the garage where eager tools were waiting to take them apart! The printers looked a bit weary of it all,.. and for good reason. :)

So first order of business is to assess what those puppies contain.

Both the Lexmark and the Canon are multi function printers as such they contain a scanner. From looking into the printers I figure I can take out the metal print head bridge and use it without too much modifications. This will be my X-axis holding the laser. The Y-axis will be the scanner maybe even in it's tray. Like in the picture below.



The bridge uses a DC motor with position encoder and the scanner uses a stepper with 4 wires. Now lets go find out how hard it is to control these.

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