Hello,

I am looking to break into CNC, and I am having some trouble figuring out where to start out.

I should say that I am a reasonably good manual machinist with a good deal of experience doing prototype fabrication work. I am also a reasonably good computer programmer. I am familiar with Linux and do a lot of microcontroller programming using open source tools... primarily in C.

I figured that I shouldn't have too much trouble cutting my teeth with CNC stuff. Given that I am an opensource nut, I was immediately attracted to EMC... hence my posting to this forum.

The first thing I want to do is get a stepper motor and just get it to turn to the location that I want using EMC. I figure that once I can get this basic setup working, then hooking the thing up to a lead screw, and adding more axises will be mostly a matter of hardware... which I'm pretty comfortable with.

It seems that EMC has got lots of bells and whistles that I will need to learn as I get more complex, but for the time being I'm just trying to get some really basic motion control under my belt.

But I'm sort of lost on where to start here. I was thinking about picking up some run of the mill stepper motors on ebay. It looks like I'll be needing some kind of "controller" but I'm not sure how to figure out what exactly will fit with what. Also, I'm not sure how these controllers want to connect to my computer, and then how to configure emc to run the controllers.

Is there a "CNC for idiots" type web page that I can get started with?

Any guidance will be much appreciated.

Thanks so much.

B