This evening while Aimee was making fidgets this evening, I took the time to assemble my Hobby CNC Pro 4 Axis control board.  This board comes as an olde tyme electronic kit.  It’s a circuit board and a bag with about 80 parts in it.  The rest is up to the person doing the assembly.

You might be thinking something to the effect of “Let me get this straight, you have dumped an absurd amount of money into this project, but then you skimp on the driver board?”  Well, yes, and no.  Some of the other drivers\controllers are very nice.  Gecko comes to mind.  Gecko is also very expensive.  Instead of paying $80, I would have paid $700 or so.

There is a really good reason to buy a Hobby CNC board, though.  If you happen to burn up a driver chip, you can desolder the chip and replace it with a new one for $10.  Because of the user assembled nature of the board, it’s a bit more forgiving.  It lacks any onboard intelligence, however I still have the option of upgrading to a Gecko or KFlop controller for about $300 later.  In this scenario I would still be able to use the Hobby CNC board as a power driver, still at a fraction of the cost of one of its competitors.

So, perhaps “Made in the USA” is a stretch, but it was assembled in the USA at the very least.