[jayty97]

I am in the process of building a 3 axis router, which is going well. I have another small rig to build; it's a pocket hole drilling setup. I am simply mounting 2 drills to a sliding platform and want the holes to be drilled at a consistent speed, so was thinking of driving it with a stepper motor. I already have a stepper, power supply and lead screw setup. I obviously don't want to run it off of a pc control. What is the best way of simply controlling a single action for a stepper? I would like the ability to adjust the stroke if needed (though it wont be very often). An ideal setup would be a foot pedal trigger, which tells the stepper to start the cycle, which will drill the two holes, then return to the original position. I have seen driver boards on Ebay, from China which are programmable with a small lcd screen. I don't know if that will be the right thing for this application. Any advise or a point in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Jay

[vger]

You may be better off using small servo to drive this. You could use a DC supply to drive it down (servos try to maintain constant speed according to applied voltage) and stop with a limit switch or opto interupter. The limit could trigger a circuit to reverse the servo to pull back till another limit (upper limit) is reached resetting for the next cycle.