Controlling a Hand Drill with Arduino to Spool Solder

Here’s an instructable showing how to Control a Hand Drill with an Arduino / roboduino to spool solder. This may not be on the top of everyone’s project list, but a hand drill is strong enough to do a lot of tasks, so we hope this will be helpful to someone with another project idea,… maybe spooling guitar pickups.
Rather than use TRIACs to mess with the 120VAC, we found a servo was an easy and safe way to control the drill’s trigger / throttle.  The setup also uses a home made optical encoder that triggers an interrupt in the arduino code.  The code is available Solder_spooler_v3_pde, and contains some useful bits like lookup-table speed control, state machine menu system, and interrupt based speed sensing.

 

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CuriousInventor launched in late 2006 (pre-arduino era!) as a place to enable hobbyists, students, and musicians to create their own technology. We sold open-source kits and tools, and offered numerous guides & videos on things like soldering, metal working, screws, electronics, and more. 

The store is now mostly empty, but we’ve kept the product pages and guides up since they have useful information. Many of our guides and videos still rank on the first page of google searches and have been seen millions of times. Content on this site and the CuriousInventor YouTube channel produced by Scott Driscoll.

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