Posted by hevans66 on Thursday, February 18, 2010
At NerdKits, we are always looking for the best way to help people learn electronics, and get excited about microcontrollers. To that end, we recently acquired a Smithy 1220XL lathe / mill combo machine. We intend to use this machine to bring you new and exciting video tutorials.
While getting acquainted with the machine, we noticed the calibrated dial ticks on the Z-axis were far too coarse to get the precise cuts we knew the machine was capable of making. So, in order to improve our machine, we created a digital read out for the axis by using a cheap digital caliper and a NerdKits Microcontroller Kit. The digital read out (DRO) uses the information from the calipers to display the current position of the cutting tool on the LCD.
This project brings a lot of neat concepts together, including a few mechanical design concepts, the use of buttons and switches with microcontrollers, and even level shifting circuits to read the signals from the small digital calipers. As always, we documented every part of the project, including explanations of the higher level concepts, physical construction, and source code. Even if you aren't into power tools and cutting metal, there's a lot to learn from this project on the electronics and programming side!
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