I am building a CNC CO2 laser machine and I want to know if Arduino is suitable to be used as a controller or not. I am using CO2 100watt and NEMA 23 stepper motor 3.6N.M and driver(TB6600)
I’d say “No”, because Ruida-class controllers generally work better for larger machines.
Although G-Code CNC controllers in the GRBL / LinuxCNC family can be made to work as laser controllers, they require considerably more adaptation.
In either case, all of the default speed & acceleration settings will be wrong for your machine, so expect to spend plenty of time calculating / measuring / verifying those values.
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Until with Cnc shield
Hi.
Welcome to the LB forum @ssss
While You do have to use a shield(s) with any raw microcontroller/PCL because they are modular by design, by itself a shield of any sort won’t help much.
Nor make things any easier.
I can understand why Arduino or any other raw microcontroller would sound like a tempting choice, but just like @ednisley there said, they require a lot of work to function as intended.
Much, much more than a case specific microcontroller that’s designed to be used to control a CO2 laser.
Or a diode for that matter.
Things get a bit easier if spitting out Arduino code is like a second nature to You, or if You can find that someone else has already written the exact code You’ll need to control everything You may desire.
In the latter case You still need to be at least somewhat fluent in Arduino/microcontroller code, otherwise You won’t be able to fine-tune the system, nor make the changes You later require.
Regards,
Sam
