Hi Roy,
By a small dremel, i was thinking of either the handpiece extension
or the little battery powered dremel. Since this in a light duty
machine, the battery version could work.
I agree that modern printers are moving very small masses with the
ink jet print heads, but i have a couple of very old massive
printers, one is a daisy wheel type, the other is a wide carriage
dot matrix. Both used a ribbon.
The idea came from the old days of drawing with ASCII characters
uning the Print command in Basic.
Myc
--- In
Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "Roy J. Tellason"
<rtellason@b...> wrote:
> 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.