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Never Drill In The Wrong Place, With This Camera! [Hackaday]
It’s fair to say that one of the biggest advances for the electronic constructor over the last decade or so has been the advent of inexpensive small-order PCB manufacture. That said, there are still plenty who etch their own boards, and for them perhaps the most fiddly part of the process comes in drilling holes accurately. It’s to aid in this task that [John McNelly] has created a camera with a periscope, to give the drill bit perfect alignment with the hole.
The idea is simple enough, an off-the-shelf all-in-one microscope camera points sideways at a mirror allowing it to look upwards. The viewport is placed under the drill and the crosshairs on the microscope are lined up with the end of the drill. Then the board can be placed on top and the pad lined up with the crosshairs, and a perfectly placed hole can be drilled. It’s a beautiful piece of lateral thinking which we like, as it ends that lottery of slightly off-centre holes. You can see it in glorious portrait-mode action in the video below the break.
Oddly this isn’t the first PCB drilling microscope we’ve shown you. but it may well be the more elegant of the two.