A really tiny CNC – a work in progress

One of my goals in designing/building this little robot was to make it really cheap and easy to build.  I’d like to think I’m headed in the right direction.

I would estimate the cost of building (a completed version of) this little robot as follows:

1. 3x Micro Servos at $6/each
2. 1x Arduino Uno at $30
3. 30.6g of ABS plastic for roughly $1.53

I’m going to exclude the bits of wire and pen, and estimate the materials cost of this robot at $49.53 which I’ll round up to about $50.00 since I have to design and print a few more plastics parts.  Basically, if you’ve already got a 3D printer, plenty of plastic, and an Arduino lying around, there’s no reason you couldn’t have a similar robot up and running in no time for about $20.

It’s my hope to use my newly won Adafruit Trinket 5v, courtesy of Hackaday and Adafruit1 , it might even be possible to power all three servos off of a single Trinket ($8) and bring the total cost of the project down to around $28 plus little bits of wire and a pen.

Although I give vague building instructions on the Thingiverse page for the parts of this robot, I hope to have an Ikea/Lego style set of instructions ready in the next day or so.  So far there are only 8 parts (including the two servo motors), so even a team of monkeys taking a break from writing Shakespeare could manage to assemble one of these in a few minutes.

1. Thanks again!!! [↩]