No hurry on the pics...it's Sunday. And yes, you have all the bases covered. I like to try to do things right, but you look like you could be the designer of some lucrative items.
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On 3/9/2019 7:09 PM, Harvey White wrote: On Sat, 9 Mar 2019 18:18:11 -0600, you wrote:
You sound like a high tech kind of hobbyist. I like! :) Of course I won't attempt that big of a project as I have many others on the back burner already. But I still have a great interest in it. And I am a hoarder in a sense so I have a lot of old electronics to salvage things from. Looks like you accomplished your goal with this one. Great job! I'll try to upload pictures into a folder some time tomorrow (sunday 3/10/19).
Yeah, somewhat high tech here. Electronics lab with HP, tektronix, fluke, (and others). Metcal soldering, binocular microscope, SMT technology, FPGAs, CPLDs, ARM processors programmed in C (would have done C++ but the manufacturer's firmware and tools don't like C++).
might as well be serious about it.... <grin>
Lets me do the bigger projects....
Harvey
Dave
On 3/9/2019 11:06 AM, Harvey White wrote:
On Sat, 9 Mar 2019 10:14:09 -0600, you wrote:
Harvey,
? Ok, so after re-reading this again, did you build this from scratch or from exiting technologies? Scratch. The PC boards for the processor and display driver and so on are home made double sided. I did not make the linear rail, bought that. Camera ditto.
Stepper driver was homemade, another PC board, power supply wasn't. Basic support stand wasn't homemade. Programming was a special purpose program, don't think I used an operating system on this one. however the display driver and such were off the shelf, but my shelf.
Box was repurposed from an old disk drive enclosure (which is where I got the power supply).
Sounds like a pretty complex project. I won't be attempting that any time soon. :) But I sure would like to see a pic of it. I'll work on getting pictures of it.
My Apache Laminator arrived yesterday and the kit to modify it the day before, so I am going to get started on that shortly. Your project listed below is very cool but I don't know that I would ever need to go that far into drilling my simple projects. I may see about putting my USB magnifier to good use though as the eyes are getting older... The techniques I needed to be able to do 10/10 double sided boards with relatively small vias, and those boards were pretty packed, at least as far as traces were concerned.
I got tired of not having the top layer match the bottom layer. I have some ruined boards because of that. Considering the work needed to make a decent board, well, I wanted to maximize the return on the effort.
Harvey
Thanks
On 3/8/2019 10:51 AM, Harvey White wrote:
On Fri, 8 Mar 2019 08:25:31 -0600, you wrote
So you use a tv camera now for your drilling? I have one of those cheap USB cameras that is a magnifier. Is that what you used? Actually, no. It's a bit more elaborate than that.
I have a linear rail that has about 6 inches of travel, then machined a holder that holds the clamp for a proxxon drill. The 12 volt version works just fine. That is driven by a linear stepper motor (shaft attached, goes in and out of the motor).
That in turn is driven by an old, but standard design (L297/L298 stepper driver system). There are sensors on the linear rail for bottom sensing and top sensing.
I found an old Pace desoldering stand, the kind used for a hot air desolderer. It has a fixed height arm with a rack and pinion stage for lowering the soldering tool.
Cut a hole in that base and mounted the proxxon upside down so it goes through the center of the hole. Mounted an old vacuum cleaner nozzle with a flexible extension so it removes debris from the underside.
On the top slide, I mounted a surveilance TV camera, this one runs on 12 volts too (most run on 24vac, and they're NOT kidding about the VAC part because there's a small transformer in there that won't tolerate DC). With an extender, it short focuses enough that I get magnification. The small monitor is mounted above the camera.
The electronics allow you to home, and set maximum travel. Pressing a footswitch starts a drill cycle, turns on the drill, moves it to the up position, then back to a rest position.
You need to recalibrate the xy position each time you change the drill bit, however.
With that, I can get very very close (say .001, I think) to the center of a hole by using the crosshairs on the monitor. Some 3D printing would help out the project, since the original design was to use the vacuum to hold the board down once the drill bit moved up. That didn't work as well.
So no, no USB camera. You could use one easily enough. The electronics could be duplicated easily enough with an arduino, but I used a board that was designed to run a small graphics display that I had a few of....
So you get to see the position, and where it is in the cycle.
A bit of overkill, perhaps, but it has proven its worth in board drilling. It does, by design, completely eliminate the parallax problem which was a great inconvenience.
Harvey
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