Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Mill: servo switch relay...

I've been using my mill quite a bit in an attempt to make a circuit board. I've finally gotten annoyed with having to turn my dremel on and off manually and decided it was time to upgrade to automation. The first step was to come up with a simple way to control a high powered device through my arduino. I thought about using a relay board. However, I went with something I thought would be a lot more fun to assemble.



All the household switch parts cost about $4. The servo was just one I had lying around. I'm sure a $12 servo would do the trick.

Next, I did a little research on G-Code, knowing the commands were already standardized. It turns out M03 is the standard command for "Turn Clockwise" and M05 is the standard for "Stop Turning". I updated my firmware and added a servo library. Here it is installed:



I am happy with the result. I did a quick search on thingiverse to see if others have done this and found a much more elegant solution: Servo Controlled Switch by oomlout

2 comments:

  1. Why not just use a relay or an SSR? You're a lot more electronics savvy than I am so I'm surprised you chose this method. Relay would be a cheaper and better solution.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I noticed you use arduino UNO. I thought reprap firmware only runs in bigger arduinos (like mega). What are you running in this UNO?

    Can you publish the pinout used from the UNO to the many parts (motors, endstops, drill)?

    ReplyDelete