Hand held PCB drill

-
I was looking for a way to drill holes in home-made PCB boards.  It seemed that my only option wa investing in a rotary tool (i.e. Dremel) with a drill press.  However there seemed to be many forum discussions where a slight swing of the drill bit during lowering the drill press was causing a misalignment of drilled PCB holes.  Then I came across small 12V motors that had a drill bit attachment. Some have made their own drill presses for this.  Search Ebay or Amazon for "pcb drill press" and you'll be able to pick one up for a few pounds/dollars.  I soldered a small button onto the side of mine and, lo and behold!  A working, hand held PCB drill!  It's easy to find sets with the motor, drill attachment and several drill bits.  I found one with a set of 2 x 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 mm bits.


So how does it fair?  I've hooked it up to a 9V battery and hey presto...:
Those are mostly 1.0 mm holes I've drilled there and by my eye they look pretty spot-on, certainly sub-mm accuracy.

TIP:  I found it useful to position the drill tip, pulse the on button lightly to drill a shallow hole in the surface and then press fully on and drill all the way through.  Useful to have a piece of wood underneath!

Always wear safety specs kids.  Flying broken drill bits are not good for the eye.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arduino and Raspberry Pi serial communciation

-
Image
Want to hook up your Arduino to your Raspberry Pi and send data between the two?  Read on! So you have your Arduino robot, or weather station and you want to send data back and forth with a Raspberry Pi?  The hardware hookup is really easy, but we have to configure a few things on the Pi. Hardware connections We'll use the serial UART pins on the Raspberry Pi Zero GPIO for this example, and transfer data from an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi zero, though all Raspberry Pis and Arduinos are capable of this feat.  The UART is a common serial communication protocol comprised of two pins labelled, RX (receive data pin) and "TX" (transmit data pin).  Wiring is easy - hook up the desired RX pin on the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi TX pin, and the Arduino TX to the Raspberry Pi RX pin.  As always, make sure you connect the ground line  between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi.  If the particular Arduino model you are using is powered by 5V (find out by measurin...
Read more

Getting started with the Pro Micro Arduino Board

-
Image
This is a brief guide to getting started with the Pro Micro Arduino Board (Atmega32U4) - not to be confused with the Pro Mini (which utilises the Atmega328P)!  Note that the Pro Micro board comes in two flavours/flavors - 5V @ 16 MHz and 3.3V @ 8 MHz, so make sure you know which you have before getting started.  It should be indicated on the bottom silkscreen of the bottom, or you could take a voltmeter and measure VCC against GND - it will be either 5V or 3.3V.
Read more