Erika
Zijay
Ahmed
Alvaro
We based our design on this recommendation to use the stepper motors from CD/DVD drive to create a small CNC machine. We used the provided code form github for the arduino, as well as a combination of Processing and GCTRL.pde to stream gcode to the arduino (bug in original code fixed in our github version).
The youtube video recommends using an Inkscape plugin to create gcode files. Although we were able to generate sensible gcode files with this plugin, we had better success with calibration and actual printing when we used simple files from this website.
Above is an example of it drawing a gingerbread man shape.