Motorized Linear Slide With Home Sensor for Robotic and CNC Using Recycled Parts

A linear slide is a bearing designed to provide free motion in one direction, Motorized linear slides such as machine slides, XY tables, roller tables and some dovetail slides are bearings moved by drive mechanisms. Not all linear slides are motorized, and non-motorized dovetail slides, ball bearing slides and roller slides provide low-friction linear movement for equipment powered by inertia or by hand. All linear slides provide linear motion based on bearings, whether they are ball bearings, dovetail bearings, linear roller bearings, magnetic or fluid bearings. XY Tables, linear stages, machine slides and other advanced slides use linear motion bearings to provide movement along both X and Y multiple axis.Motorized linear slides are important parts of robotic and CNC projects. When you need precise controlled motion of a part like table.

This Slider is part of an Epson LQ 2170 dot matrix printer that was bought from scrapyard. Tractor assembly was separated and unnecessary parts were cut out. Printer heads were taken out and a CNC cut 2 mm steel plate for attaching mount were screwed to tractor. You can see an example in my instructables DIY-delta-3D-printer-using-low-cost-recycled-parts

Slider in action video

For moving the slider you need a stepper motor driver board like DRV8825 or REPRAP driver. In my case each step of motion was 0.106 millimeters but if you use a microstepping driver board you can have much smaller step size. You can use a micro controller to send required pulses for motion.