The Hackerspace Kraków in Poland hosts a weekly event on Fridays called NightHack. The idea is simple. It’s late Friday night, all the stores are closed — something needs to be hacked.
Just this past Friday night, they decided to try making a CNC machine using only what they had in the space. And gosh darn it, did they ever succeed! The build makes use of an Arduino Mega, broken Playstation 3 drives, a few spare L293D ICs, some hot glue, and wood. The resulting CNC machine is an awesome example of what can be done in a night with the right group of people working together.
It might not be powerful enough to do milling, but works quite well as a small CNC drawing plotter with its massive 5x5cm work area, with a resolution of 0.16mm. Next week they hope to modify it to allow for PCB drilling, which at the right feed rates, might just be possible!
We think the concept of this meetup is awesome — every hackerspace has oodles of old junk piled up, perhaps never to be used. This is a great way to force projects to be completed and old components to be used up. Let us know in the comments if you plan to start scheduling a similar meetup — we love to share these kinds of projects!
[Thanks Jakub!]Filed under: cnc hacks, Hackerspaces
