Homebrew PCBs

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.