Hi. My name is Mark, and I am from Bucks County Pennsylvania. I am a student of DeVry University in the Electronics engineering bachelors program. I found your website through a simple google search. I became interested in cnc after reading several projects through the instructibles.com community. There are many stepper control circuits there, but nothing for servo control. I plan to develop a servo control that is inexpensive, and distribute it to the instructibles.com community. Personally, as a student, I do not have much capital to invest in this project, but would still like to have a full featured 3-axis cnc router to make circuit boards without chemicals, and possibly to cut foam for casting metal parts.

The control I plan to develop will include a servo for each axis; x, y, and z, plus a pwm h-bridge for my cutting tool. Most people on the Instructibles community seem to want to run Mach 3, but that requires the use of a parallel port, which most computers don't have any more. I plan to make my contribution fully usb compliant, even though that may be over zealous. I am going to use a Microchip PIC18fxxxx series microcontroller, but I have not finalized my hardware as of yet. The PIC18fxx31 microcontrollers feature a built in quadrature encoder interface, or a PIC18fxx53 which includes native usb communication. I hope that I can make this work in mach 3, but I am sure that i can scrip linux emc2 to work

I really want to join this site to gain more cnc experience, and I like to see if I can find an answer to my questions, before I ask for help.