Yes I understand this isn’t exactly the right place to ask this, but I believe it fits enough to be forgivable. I plan on building a mini lathe and would like to control it with nema 17 78 oz/in steppers. I have some of these already. I also have a couple extra ramps boards and an extra um1.5.7 clone. I also have the drivers. Anyone done this with ramps?. Anyone know where I can find firmware/ a front end for this setup?
Lathe huh. You gonna make a hot end?
@Eclsnowman I’m probably going to make more stuff than I know what to do with 
I want cnc and motor speed control so I can thread. I really want to see if I can make custom acme or or ball screws. Also custom aluminum worms for custom printed gears. I will also probably add a combo slide to do small mill work on it.
Also can a metric cnc lathe cut sae threads and vice versa. Or would it be best to program 2 different arduinos and swap when I need as well as swap the lead screw? arduino swap is faster than firmware flash (when implemented correctly of course
Do you have any machining experience on manual equipment.
@D_Rob At the precision of most CNC’s, metric / SAE doesn’t matter to the average hobbyist. For example, if you have a 1.8 degree stepper being driven at 1/16 micro stepping that is 3,200 steps per turn. If that is turning a 5 turns per inch screw you end up with a theoretical precision of 1 / 16,000" or 0.0015875 mm (plus backlash).
I am pretty sure there are 3+ designs on thingiverse and some on http://inventables.com and http://instructables.com.
@Bob_Roth no. but i had no experience prior to building printers. now im working on my own variant
@D_Rob I think you don’t realise actually building a lathe to do this isn’t that easy.
Your be better off buying a good quality model lathe and converting it to CNC.
Or just buy a lathe and either a threading tool or die head and manually cut a thread. If you’ve no machining experience getting everything totally true to cut threads is a nightmare as you need to be .5 inch or better to produce a constant product.
I’m in the usual situation of having to agree with @Nigel_Dickinson :p.
Hobby lathes are so damn cheap, you’ll likely end up breaking even if everything works perfectly the first time (how often does that happen). Also, there’s a reason why even the Chinese manufactured ballscrews and leads aren’t incredibly cheap; afaik, it’s hard to machine a thread to the kind of tolerances you’ll need for a decent lead screw. Fair enough if you just want to build it for fun but It sounds like a monster to me.
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I just had a talk yesterday with a co-worker about converting our small desktop lathe to CNC. Should be pretty easy from the hardware side, as the motors are easy to control from the Arduino. You could run a modified Marlin or a modified GRBL.
I already modified GRBL to run from an ArduinoMega2560 for a big mill I’m building with people: https://github.com/daid/grbl/tree/edge_lcd
CAM software wise I have no idea. But I would expect horror 
@Daid_Braam there’s lots of CNC software free or paid out there. It produces G code just like a slicer.
@Daid_Braam you could never build a CNC machine as well as the people who make them. They are really good at it. the programming software is so good you could never compete with it.
@Nigel_Dickinson For CNC lathe? I already found the CNC milling field pretty bad. “It’s not bad software, you just need to learn to use it” seems all too common.
@Bob_Roth So… I could never build a machine as good as people who build machines? But if I build a machine I would be part of the people who build machines right?
And if I would program software for CNC machines, then I could never compete with myself? That’s just crazy talk.
After all. I do program CNC software. And I do build CNC machines.
@Daid_Braam thought kiss slicer was able to do milling…
Oh, and @D_Rob There is a community called DIY CNC. Might want to ask there?
@Nigel_Dickinson Skeinforge could do milling and even “turning” which I assumed is CNC Lathe.
Linuxcnc has lathe support
FWIW, if you index (CNC) the spindle, it opens up a whole weird world of possibilities. (Carved braid from wood, a cylindrical maze, milling chain from one contiguous part)