He’s a little cagey about the reasons, but [Ivan Miranda] plans to put a drill press on the internet. What could go wrong with that?
We’ll take [Ivan] at his word that there’s a method to this madness and just take a look at the build itself, in the hopes that it will inspire someone to turn their lowly drill press into a sorta-kinda 2-axis milling machine. [Ivan] makes extensive use of his 3D printer to fabricate the X-axis slide that bolts to the stock drill press table. And before anyone points out the obvious, [Ivan] already acknowledges that the slide is way too flimsy to hold up to much serious drilling, especially considering the huge mechanical advantage of the gearing he used to replace the quill handle for a powered Z-axis. The motor switch was also replaced with a solid state relay. The steppers, relay, and limit switches are all fed into a Teensy that talks to an ESP8266, which will presumably host a web interface to put this thing online.
The connected aspects of the drill press become a little more clear after the break.
Turns out [Ivan] had a sort of an Internet performance art piece in mind, wherein visitors to his website would get to vote on which of two phones would be executed by lethal drill pressing. The ways in which this project failed were manifold, from website errors that let the first visitor select a phone within eight minutes of going live, to inability of the stepper to drive the quill, to the surprisingly sturdy screens on the cheap phones. Oh well, these failures are a great satirical representation of the ills IoT has in its near future.
Perhaps you’ll enjoy these other drill press tricks, like turning a drill press into a spindle sander, or even giving a benchtop press a column transplant to allow bigger workpieces.
[via r/Arduino]
Filed under: internet hacks, tool hacks
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