• Good work dealing with stepper motors at this level. I did a CNC drill for PC boards a few years back but I used the EMC2 software to control the steps to the motors on the 3 axis.

    It occurred to me that an optical lever could be of use.
    Attach clamp glue the motor frame to the table.
    Attach a small plane mirror to the motor shaft so the flat of the mirror is parallel to the shaft.
    From a few feet away fix a LASER pointer to the table so that the beam hits the mirror.
    The reflected beam should make a spot on the wall.
    Mark the spot on the wall.
    Now step the motor one step and see how much the beam moves on the wall.
    A full 360 degrees of steps should align the beam back on the wall spot..
    The EMC2 website:
    http://linuxcnc.org/
    Use a parallel PC port to control direction and steps on 4 axis and uses G code files.
    G code:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code
    I used the coordinates in the Eagle drill files and a C++ program to create the G-code file for my drill.
    G-code on Arduino
    http://reprap.org/wiki/Arduino_GCode_IntĀ­erpreter

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