I am somewhat new to arduino but I am not afraid to learn...infact I enjoy it.
materials I have: Arduino uno and 2 high torque servos.
Access to a machine shop.
Goal: I want to make a machine, automated, that will drill holes in the center of corks. I find drilling holes manually to be time consuming so I was thinking I would enjoy automating this..
I was thinking a large platter with holes around it that I could place the corks in for the motors to turn and drill holes in.
I know this will require precision so maybe I need stepper motors? (never worked with them but I dont mind learning!)
I was thinking one stepper motor to rotate the platter to position the corks. My 2 high torque servos can be useful by one of them moving the other servo vertically so that the servo being moved can hold a drill bit to drill the corks. I would need to think of a holder of some sort to hold the corks in place..
that would be the platter with corks.
That is my thought on how I could possibly accomplish this and now I would like your opinion on how this could be achieved (design wise or even hardware suggestion of where to get what or what I would need)
some possible examples of suggestions: hot glue cut 1.2" internal diameter pvc tubing to act as cork holders in the platter
look for pottery spinning plates and drill holes in those for the platter
use some sort of belt to move the attached servo vertically.
What you're trying to make sounds like a drill press and an indexing table. I think the easiest and most reliable approach would be to use a conventional drill press - or make your own to a similar design.
I'm envisaging something reasonably substantial and I doubt that an ordinary hobby servo would be powerful enough to operate it, but I'm sure you could find a geared motor which would cope with it. For simplicity I'd be inclined to use limit switches to control the vertical travel, but if you want to make it more general then a stepper motor/servo would give arbitrary depth control.
Can you turn the head of the drill press 90 degrees (drill horizontally)? You could roll the corks down a slope, clamp the one at the bottom of the slope, drill it, unclamp the drilled cork and let it fall away...
How similar in size are your corks? I note that the trivet I made out of wine corks shows significant variation across those corks in both dimensions. May make it harder to grip and drill.
What you need is simpler as you only need to index your platter and move the drill up and down, but the general principles in the milling links should be helpful.
I think your main problem will be holding the corks firmly and verticaly.
Also if the corks are in firm enough for drilling it might be a pain to get them back out, though I suppose the hole might make that easier.
You might want to make the holes in the platter stepped.
The corks would be pushed into the platter till they hit the step.
After drilling you could press the platter onto a circle of pegs that would go up through the holes and eject the corks.
