Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

I'm in the planning stages of a Fixed Gantry Router build and will be using Acorn CNC12. Will mostly be machining aluminum, so maybe more of a mill than a router. I've looked thru the documentation (the installation manual is excellent) and video's but still have a few basic questions.

1) As with most hobby DIYers I'm on a budget and will likely be using one of the many metric ball screws available on Ebay and Amazon. However, I plan to work in Inches (Imperial). I assume this can be handled in the set-up / configuration of CNC12, is that a good assumption?

2) What is the primary difference between a mill and a router from the Acorn CNC12 perspective?

Once I move from the planning stage to the design phase I'm sure I'll have more questions. Thanks in advance for any help/comments. I'm looking forward to using the this forum.

Jim (JRD56)

To answer your questions, yes you can work in inches with metric ball screws and the primary difference between mill and router is the VCP layout. Mill VCP has mostly mill functions and the router VCP has mostly router functions. It’s the exact same software but with different VCP layouts. You can still customize either one to suit your needs or use it as is right out of the box.

1) As with most hobby DIYers I'm on a budget and will likely be using one of the many metric ball screws available on Ebay and Amazon. However, I plan to work in Inches (Imperial). I assume this can be handled in the set-up / configuration of CNC12, is that a good assumption?

-The controller doesn't care what the pitch of the screw is. All it really cares about is how many steps to go one of whichever unit you're using.

If it takes 20,000 steps exactly to move one inch, that just means it'll take 787 steps to move one millimeter. Doesn't matter if it's an inch-pitch screw, metric, or a rack-and-pinion drive.

Doc.