FluidNC 4 axis foam cutter controller

freedom2000 · November 15, 2024, 6:06pm

Hi all,

I have started this hackaday project to design a foam cutter controller.

Of course everything will be open source and open hardware.
PCB is under production at PCBWay and will be available there.

I’ll keep you informed on this page as soon as this project will progress !

current specifications are:

able to drive a hot wire
equiped with 4 bipolar steppers
driven by standard polulu shields
and with a “heart” ESP32 MCU
FluidNC driven
able to “eat” gcode produced by any “foam cutter” software

regarding this last feature I sincerely hope to test it with GRBLGru !

I have taken benefit of 11th/11 and bought the 4x drivers for less than than 4€ and 4x 1.5A NEMA17 bipolar steppers for 22€ (shipment included)
ESP32 costs less than 5€. So it will be a very cheap board

freedom2000 · November 25, 2024, 6:16pm

I have just received the PCBs!

They look great !

freedom2000 · December 3, 2024, 1:39pm

Hi There,

PCB is soldered and the four steppers motors run perfectly!

I still need to test the hotwire but I am very confident !

freedom2000 · December 4, 2024, 9:23am

Ok so now fully tested ! It works.

So it has become the first “Fluidnc official foam cutter board”

See here : fluidNC existing hardware

bottom of the page

freedom2000 · December 13, 2024, 2:47pm

Hi,

I have struggled a lot with GRBLhotwire… Since beginning of december it didin’t work neither with my MM2001 board nor with my new FluidNC foam cutter board.

Bart and Mitch from FluidNC helped me to correct a few non blocking bugs of GRBLhotWire (release V2.9 PR2). But it didn’t correct the major blocking problem.

I also exchanged with RC Keith who is maintaining GRBLHotwire.
He finally discovered that the bug wasn’t in our sides (My board, FluidNC nor GRBLhotwire App) but on Microsoft side after latest upgrade of Windows10 and 11…
The serial driver no longer works properly…

Keith has documented this bug on his web site : driver problem

Reinstalling previous drivers corrects the issue…

On my side I have finished to test my board. It’s working perfectly now

Documentation is deeply updated and contains not only how to do it but also how to use it:
hackaday project
PCBWay board