Equipment/Dahlgren Wizzard 2000 ST

This is a project to convert a CNC engraver to a CNC pcb drill.

The Engraver is a Dahlgren Wizzard 2000 ST.

It needs

• a little bit of a clean up.
• 3 x stepper motors (NEMA 14 by the looks of it)
  • I've got a nema 17 and may be able to source 2 more. Would that fit ? -artag
• a way of connecting the steppers to the leadscrews.
  • Hipster has some couplers of a type that are now really cheap on ebay
• a drill of some kind.
  • Some people are using aero/quadcopter motors. Would the controller handle one ? might need a sensorfull motor
• a way to fix the drill to the x/y platform.
• chuck for the drill.
  • Collets are much better than a chuck. An ER12 collet chuck would be better than the cheap dremel style, but needs a decent sized motor shaft. There may be something more suitable for auto toolchange (one day)
• small drill bits.
• some rewireing to fix endstops etc.

At the moment the engraver comes with an embedded computer (386FX!), which powers up and works fine, and is connected to a control board that has 3 x stepper drivers and a brushless dc motor controller on it.

Choices

We've got 3 main choices:

1. Use the existing controller, but we'd need to give it the steppers and drill that it expects.
2. Chuck the existing control board and use an arduino or something to talk to the existing drivers
3. Chuck all the electronics and do it all our selves.

The first may be the quickest, but we'd need to get identical parts - the manufacturer may sell them, which might make them more expensive.

The second will involve some hardware reverse enginerring to work out the pinouts to talk the existing drivers

The 3rd might also be fairly easy - presumably we can use the reprap style electronics with it??

Pics

• stepper drivers
• other bits on the interface board
• 386 computer + transformer
• top view
• view of the mounting thing for a stepper, NEMA 14?
• the cover