Brand new to CNC, looking for what is really needed

Hey NIQ,

if you want to see the CAMotics toolpath visualisation, you got to know that although it is installed on the Onefinity Controller, it will not show up if you just attach a display to the Onefinity Controller, no matter how big it is. You will see it only if you run the Onefinity Controller application (which is a web application that runs in a web browser) from an average laptop/desktop computer remotely. This is because the Onefinity Controller on its internal Raspbian installation has not the graphics hardware acceleration drivers installed to show the 3D visualization CAMotics offers.

The woodworker 32″×32″ is now available with thick 50 mm rails on X axis. Generally, all users say that the Onefinity offers very high precision and is very, very sturdy and rigid, compared to other machines for the same target audience. The only thing for which I would recommend another machine is when you plan to mill mainly steel. But you will be able to cut all the materials you mentioned with the Onefinity.

The Onefinity CNC Controller, which is a hardware and a software fork of Buildbotics Controller, has four stepper motor drivers of type Texas Instruments DRV8711. Each of them can be assigned to axis X,Y,Z, and A. A is traditionally a rotary axis. In factory configuration, there are two stepper drivers assigned to Y because since the Onefinity is a CNC of gantry type, it has two Y steppers. In order to use one stepper for axis A, a rotary axis, you can either run the two Y steppers on one stepper driver, which is commented here, or, as is the case in some rotary scenarios, you don’t need one of X or Y because you always stay over the centerline of the rotary axis, in this case users simply disconnected the X or one Y motor and attached the motor of the rotary axis to this stepper driver and configured it as A. But if you plan to put a rotary axis diagonally, of course you will need both X and Y to work.

In fact the matter when wanting to run a rotary axis is if your CAM software and its postprocessor supports a rotary object.

If you want to learn more about rotary axis on the Onefiniy, the information is spread around the forum a little, but you will find it with rotary and 4th axis

You can make yourself an image of Vectric Pro with the tips here. Note that you don’t forcibly need the Vectric Aspire Software which is very expensive just because you want to create 3D objects. You can do this with a lot of other 3D softwares and import the objects into VCarve Pro or into another CAM software. One Free and Open 3D software is Blender, and there are many other 3D softwares.

One thing that may be considered when restricting to software with perpetual license is what is being brought up here.