Design, build and programming a small milling machine

Abstract

The goal of this project is to design and build a prototype of a small milling machine. What makes special this milling machine is it is going to be intended for milling in a vehicle registration plate. The size of our vehicle registration plate is 50x10x1,5 cm. That’s why the dimensions of our milling machine must be the less as possible in order to save usable space and the most important think in engineering, save the more materials/money we can. On the other hand, this milling machine is going to be designed for milling small letters and small drawings in within the vehicle registration plate. Because of that, we will need to build the milling machine with enough accuracy to achieve this goal. The main material of the structure of our milling machine will be wood (3mm MDF). In order to get the enough precision in our milling, we will decide all the mobile parts of our milling machine will be made with two plates fitted. To move the three mobile cars we will use three stepped motors that will make possible all the movements in the X,Y,Z axis. The other basic aspect in our thesis is that this machine is going to be a CNC milling machine. A machine tool that uses programs to automatically execute a series of machining operations. CNC machines offer increased productivity and flexibility. For make this possible, we will use an electronic system based on Arduino UNO hardware and software. Besides the Arduino UNO, we will use other hardware and software.