Add a reasonable digital readout to your drill press

A drill press is a really great tool that permits you to slowly drill holes which might be completely perpendicular to the work piece. And good drill presses provide you with a readout that permits you to drill to a exact depth. However the low-cost drill press stands for hand drills make that troublesome. To resolve this downside on a price range, Minikk designed an inexpensive digital readout add-on.

This digital readout could be very helpful. It reveals precisely how far you progress the drill, with a precision of 0.01 millimeters. And it allows you to set the zero level (sometimes the highest floor of the fabric) so that you don’t must do any math in your head.

Minikk achieved this with a reasonable digital caliper. That has an LCD display screen with out a backlight and it’s onerous to learn, so Minikk hacked it with an Arduino Nano board so as to add a way more readable OLED display screen. That was potential as a result of this digital caliper, like many of the price range fashions available on the market, has a management board that’s accessible by way of I2C. That lets the Arduino pull the measurements to show on the OLED.

With a 3D-printed mount and enclosure to carry every thing in place, Minikk now has a fairly correct and exact digital readout that didn’t break the again. This lets them drill holes to precisely the required depth with none problem. Better of all, Minikk uploaded the sketch and 3D information so you may add a digital readout to your drill press.