After buying a few wrong cables (it turns out that you cannot use a parallel-to-USB adapter) and collecting as much information as I could from the CNC Zone forum, I made some tremendous progress on the CNC machine.

The first thing I had to do was to figure out how to wire up the stepper motor to the controller board. The board has 4-pin terminals for the motors, but the motors I purchased were 6-wire motors, so it took me a while to figure out which wires were unnecessary, and then what order the wires need to be to work with the controller.

I went through nearly every configuration possible before I read that you can control the voltage going to the motors by turning a surface-mounted potentiometer. I had nearly no voltage to the motor, causing the motor to hum, but not actually do anything. Once I figured out the problem, I set the proper voltage and got the motor to move.



I currently have the X-Axis of the CNC machine set up. After getting the motor to run last night, I figured it was now time to get the X-Axis to move.

Check it out:


Now that the X-Axis is complete, it's time to start building the table, and mounting the Y-Axis on top of the X-Axis platform.