Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

The Nueromaker is ready to accept your G-code and drill for you!

This 1 foot by 3 foot CNC machine is controlled by a custom Ubuntu distro, LinuxCNC, which makes it as simple as booting up the machine, loading your gcode (with '.nc' extension), and pressing play. Of course, picking the right drill bit is important too!

There's a lot to learn about "feeds and speeds" with CNC machines - the speed at which the drill bit spins and the speed the drill bit is moved through the wood has ramifications in the lifespan of the drill bit and the likelihood of the bit snapping pre-maturely. For beginners, when doing simple engraving operations (as well as cutting), keeping the speed of the router constant and using default values will do fine, at the expense of the lifespan of the drill bit. 

For simple 2D (or multiple depths, known as 2.5D) jobs, we can use the free software at makercam.com - a flash application that we also have stored locally incase the internet is acting up.