No, nothing published as yet. You are also right about the "complex machine that needs everything to work nicely together to get a good end result" - or even to work at all. The wire feed and tensioner (DC motor with PWM control for wire feed plus stepper for tensioning) is one sub-assembly and includes a solenoid-operated guillotine mechanism for chopping used wire into short lengths as it comes out the end. Then there's the water flow and filtration, the XY movement with ballscrews and profile rails (tank moves on one axis and wire guide assembly on the other) plus stepper motors, and then the electronics. This machine has three PIC embedded microcontrollers in it - one for the keypad and screen, one for wire control, and one for spark generation which also controls the XY motion as these are inter-related. If anything is below par, then nothing works. In testing, a few weeks were wasted chasing electronic faults when it turned out that the deionised water wasn't quite pure enough. It's that bad. Electrical noise has been a perennial problem which is why the main control board is now up to version 9b, there are three separate power supplies, and it's wall-to-wall opto-isolators and so on.

Cutting area is something like 100mm square (although I need to check this). It uses a variable spark voltage of something like 35-60V although it generally seems happy at about 50V. Sparks are generated from a bank of capacitors switchable from 10uF to 100uF or so (again, need to check but it's something like that). It uses MOSFETs for switching - turn on one to charge capacitor bank, when charged that MOSFET turns off and another turns on to cause the spark. When the capacitor voltage has dropped below some threshold, the spark is turned off and the cycle restarts. The motion control is linked to this; if no spark occurs the wire is advanced and if the voltage drops too low the wire is stopped or even backed up a little. It's a very simple idea but has taken a lot of work to make it function. Wire speed is separately controllable. All the motion control software was custom-written; no use of modified Mach3, LCNC, Kmotion, grbl, or anything else. This does mean that the software has complete control of wire motion so it is possible to backtrack the entire cutting path if needed, for example if a cut ends in the middle of a workpiece rather than cutting its way out again.

We do not use any fancy commercial EDM components apart from the reel of EDM wire. So, no commercial wire guides, wire contacts, or things like that. Keeps the price down but whether this is going to hang together in the long term remains to be seen. It certainly works at the moment. There is already a long list of "wouldn't it be great if we could..." ideas!