For my  Senior project, I converted a manual bench top mill into an automatic CNC machine tool.

Three high torque stepper motors were attached to the work table and head of the mill.  Aspeed variator was installed to control the spindle speed. EMC, an open source Linux- based application, was used to control the motor drives and integrate the motion of all three axes of the mill, through a graphical user interface (GUI) and simple g-code commands.