Arduino CNC Shield Power Routing

[Desertboy]

Hi and welcome to the forum. What is a CNC shield? Its hard to answer questions without links to what you are trying to do. We don't tend to use Arduino's to run cnc machines.



Not sure I understand this statement have a look at LinuxCnc and see if you change your mind about advanced open source.

There are many people on here running 3D printers as well as cnc machines.

It's true on here most people have bigger machines so no one seems to use an arduino but the arduino cnc community is bigger than you think mainly because of shapeoko and xcarve.

At the moment it's really only good for 3 axis but you can actually wire up much better stepper drivers to the cnc shield and run the power directly bypassing the shield and get very acceptable performance for very little money.

It's not a as good as a linuxcnc solution of course but it's really not bad at all, they worked very hard to sort usb issues out and have a very decent light production solution grbl is a project to watch out for as they migrate to more powerful ARM based controllers. They have a working 4 axis solution but it doesn't all fit in the arduino uno.

I'm going to use an arduino, cncshield, 24v power supply & nema 23's with cheapo 2amp steppers for now but will get proper drivers and a breakout board relatively soon.

I see the Arduino as a very powerful cnc platform but overshadowed by better commercial solutions but at the price point it cannot be beaten.