I have a small workshop. I like it. It's comfortable though I wish the water heater wasn't in it. My Sherline 5000 mill is a bench-top mill. The footprint is about 15 x 10 inches, maybe 20 inches high. A 30 inch segment of my workbench is plenty of room to contain everything, tools, cutters, etc.
Many CNC systems are built around a common PC sending signals out the parallel port to a stepper motor driver that controls the motors. There is good, free software for controlling the part of the process that actually moves the machine. If I were to use a PC I'd be adding quite a bit of hardware to the system. The last thing I want to do is stuff a PC tower and a monitor in my workshop.
Then there is the matter of the design process. There is good, free software for basic CAD design available for the PC (Linux) so I could do everything on this PC. But I don't want to. My workshop is a bit cold and I don't want to sit still and plug away on a computer sitting on a bar stool or standing. (No room for a decent chair and computer workstation.)
What I want to do is design on my laptop anywhere in the house I want. I don't want to mess with networking my laptop to the PC I don't want in my workshop.
There are many stepper motor drivers that take "step and direction" signals to control the steppers. I've done some work with the Arduino microcontroller and I know it's capable of doing such a thing. There is a question of speed, of course. I've researched it quite a bit and I think it will do fine if I'm not trying to have it do too many complicated things.
The system will be composed of a laptop where design and tool path generation is done, the Arduino which receives motion commands from the laptop and the stepper driver. If this is the path I will take, it will fall on me to write the software to glue it all together. Fortunately I write software for a living so I'm pretty sure I can handle it.
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