Homebrew PCBs

On Saturday 11 June 2005 08:10 pm, mycroft2152 wrote:

> My first thought was converting an old printer. Attaching a small dremel to
> the print head. I would move the print head across the page stoping at the
> appropriate spot and the pulls the handle. Afte all the holes on one line
> were drilled, go to the next line. After all if you cn print a grid of dots
> on a page, you could move the print heaad with simple commands.

If you're talking about the use of the hardware platform,  and maybe the 
circuitry to drive it with,  giving it your own commands rather than relying 
on the logic in the printer,  you might be able to make this work.  Biggest 
problem I see is that the mass of any dremel is going to likely be *way* more 
than that of any printhead,  unless you're talking about a really old 
printer.  I have a couple of those in storage presently awaiting their turn 
to be scrapped,  but I don't expect that they're especially common these 
days,  and the newer stuff uses as little material as they can possibly get 
away with,  including much smaller motors.

Dunno what you mean by "a small dremel",  they all seem to be pretty much the 
same size to me.  And the mass of moving that is where you may run into 
trouble.  Way more than just a print head.  So in addition to slowing down 
compared to the speed of a print head,  you'll probably want to modify those 
components as well.

> The second idea I had, after looking at all the drivers chps and
> software and discussion about half stepping and choppers, was that the
> driller could be very light duty due to the size of the board and the
> coarseness of the steps.
>
> Looking at the old Nasa stepper design, that uses 2 flip flops and a
> couple of nor gates, I realized that 2 lines would be all that i
> really need for single stepping.

That sounds like the design that I'm probably going to end up with here for 
any number of things.