Anyone know anything about the Cricut hardware?

[Pommie]

Tomorrow, I'm going to get a Cricut machine that's useless. One of the feed rollers on the machine has come loose on the feed rod and fallen into a hole. The company that makes it is replacing it with a new machine and has no intention of fixing it. The machines all have a serial number and any "job" has to go via their website and if the serial number has been "disabled" then it no longer works.

My view is, I get the hardware to do this, steppers etc. It appears to have x and y steppers, a tool select something, a power to the head something and who knows what else.

Anyone any advanced knowledge what I'm likely to find?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Mike.

 

[rjenkinsgb]

No knowledge of those machines, sorry.

I do remember seeing on the Duet3D forums that someone was using a Duet controller PCB to do vinyl cutting.

That may be a simple approach, just replace the existing control board for a Duet 3D printer controller board, it should drive the steppers etc. directly and they are extremely configurable, for such as 3D printing or CNC style cutting, and working with numerous different hardware / axis arrangements.

You then just need a CAD program that can output suitable G code files.

 

[augustinetez]

The missus has got one - proprietary software inside the machine and Cricut aggressively persues anyone who back engineers it and yes it constantly "talks back to base".

I would look in to RJ's suggestion if you want to get it going.

I've got a bigger semi-commercial machine (different company) that I'm thinking of going down the open source software option if I can get the mechanical part fixed (Mr Nobody knocked it over and didn't tell anybody).