The hardest part of a project like this is getting repeatable positioning out of an open loop stepper, and the maker appears to handle it by watching the feed parameters. Missed steps show up when acceleration and speed are pushed too high, so keeping those values sane is the whole ballgame on a drive with no feedback. That honesty about the limitation is worth a lot in itself.
The build itself is a retrofit: an aluminum extrusion fence riding a linear rail carriage on a cast iron table saw top, with a router table extension on the wing. The whole thing was designed in SketchUp and Fusion 360, and this is the first physical revision. An Arduino runs the system, driven by a 300 oz-in stepper, while an older, cheap Fire tablet mounted on the front acts as the interface and talks to the Arduino over Bluetooth.
Several details stand out. There are auto-zero routines for both the saw and the router wing, plus directional jog arrows with Fine, Normal and Fast speed settings. The carriage can also be slid by hand using its red toggle clamps, which seems like a genuinely useful bit of flexibility. Under the aluminum router extension sits a wooden dust collection box, and the saw wears a wooden zero-clearance insert. The stated goal behind all of it is fancy joinery, which is a great reason to chase this kind of precision.
It is not finished, and the maker says so plainly. Sensors and an e-stop still need to be mounted, and the carriage blocks could use a sweeper or scraper. Both are exactly the sort of items I would expect on a second revision, and I will be curious where the next iteration goes.
Project by medicineman007. Watch it on their YouTube channel: