I have found the Dimension Engineering site with their motor drivers and Kangaroox2 positioner device. Reading the manuals, these devices look perfect for what I want; to make a simplified cnc control for my milling machine using simple DC motors with position feedback from the DRO scales. The Kangaroo gadget has a built in PID and accepts a quadrature input for the position feedback. What I need help with is: I have no clue how to write the Arduino code to allow me to program it to cut my parts. I want to use the above components so I don’t have to rip my mill apart and install ballscrews. I have tried to find code for this sort of thing and cannot…does anybody have anything?
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Hi @hugoatCFR and welcome to the forum.
This sounds like an interesting project, but I also couldn’t find already made solution with this hardware setup.
I see a lot of posts on Arudino forum related to using Sabertooth and kangaroox2 but non related to making a CNC machine.
If you really want to use this setup, I guess you can start with small steps, just programming simple motor movements and positions controlled from Arduino.
Later on, you can make your own library which will translate X,Y,Z coordinates to the motor movements.
Or maybe you can use some of the controllers dedicated to CNC. For example, from PoLabs: https://www.robotshop.com/collections/polabs
I hope this helps, feel free to ask anything else.
Hi igor_x, many thanks for your warm welcome and your suggestions, I will read up on the PoLabs devices. I think my next step will be to order some of the hardware items and start playing 
I suspect its going to take a bit (read a lot) of trial and error. thanks again!
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You are welcome
Well…I spent the winter months working on this project. I bought some motors, a Sabertooth 2x32 and a kangaroo x2. Already had an arduino. Long story short…set it all up, got a buddy to help with the code and was able to get all three axes motors working just as I wanted on the benchtop, with the motors turning a piece of masking tape. It took a couple of months all in all but it was winter and I had time to do the groundwork. Fast forward and I have now machined all the stuff to mount the motors on the machine. I am unable to auto tune the motors like I did during testing because they are now on the machine. Dimension engineering has a method to tune them with their software called Describe. It doesn’t work. Hours spent, multiple emails to Dimension Engineering who try to be helpful…eventually… This equipment is on the verge of being good. Can Robot Shop service these items? I’d pay to have them tested because I can’t even get them to auto tune now.
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Hi @hugoatCFR ,
Unfortunately RobotShop does not provide such services.
But you can send these to Dimension Engineering and should be able to repair/fix/tune these.