Anyone mess around with Arduino (microprocessors)?

[InVOLuntary]

My son has gotten into it and has dragged me into it. If you are not familiar you can program them to do about anything. It's an open source platform so there are hundreds of hardware add-ons and free code to work with. They can be had for about $20 on eBay or Amazon. I'm going to work with him to construct a CNC plasma cutting table. We've had some success and have hit some stumbling blocks. Thought maybe some on here have used them.

 

[VolStrom]

My son has gotten into it and has dragged me into it. If you are not familiar you can program them to do about anything. It's an open source platform so there are hundreds of hardware add-ons and free code to work with. They can be had for about $20 on eBay or Amazon. I'm going to work with him to construct a CNC plasma cutting table. We've had some success and have hit some stumbling blocks. Thought maybe some on here have used them.

I have a few and have played around with them some. They're kind of a pain to program. As a CNC controller though, that sounds like a bit of a stretch unless someone has already written an enormous amount of code to make it work and even then it's probably buggy as hell.

 

[InVOLuntary]

I have a few and have played around with them some. They're kind of a pain to program. As a CNC controller though, that sounds like a bit of a stretch unless someone has already written an enormous amount of code to make it work and even then it's probably buggy as hell.

Many are doing it and evidently fairly successful. The code is out there. We had the steppers running on the bench. The problem is we were using his Arduino UNO which is barely can house the program. So I purchased the MEGA which is basically the same board with more memory and more pins. That's where we've hit the stumbling block. We can't seem to get the code to work.

 

[Rasputin_Vol]

Bought one last year from digikey.com and haven't had a chance to even pull it out the box. My thinking was that I would start to use it once I had more free time from my job.