COMPUTARISED XY COORDINATE DRILLING MACHINE

ABSTRACT
Creating holes on the objects or circuit boards is an important stage in electronic production.
Holes of different sizes and at a large number of positions must be drilled with high precision for
manual or automatic insertion of various electronic devices and components. For this purpose, it
has designed and built an automatic drilling machine. The values of the coordinate points are
typed on the keypad, with the help of software such as micro code studio. At a time the system
can make holes on several holes together. This research describes control system of an automatic
drilling machine. Three motors are used to move the axes such as X, Y, Z. They are placed in the
Cartesian shape on the frame. PIC 16F887 is used to compare the output voltage from the motor
driver circuit. PIC generates output signal to the LCD and motors. LCD (16x4) is used to display
the values of X, Y, Z coordinates that intend to drill. By using LCD, user can know which points
are drilled on the object. DC motor is used to drill the object when coordinates reach their values.
This system is, especially, used to make (PCB) printed circuit board in industry. By applying this
machine in production industry, it can bring the multi production in short time.
INTRODUCTION
A drilling machine, called a drill press, is used to cut holes into or through metal, wood, or other
materials. Drilling machines may be used to perform other operations. They can perform counter
sinking, boring, counter boring, spot facing, reaming, and tapping. All drilling machines have the
following construction characteristics a spindle, sleeve or quill, column, head, worktable, and
base. The spindle holds the drill or cutting tools and revolves in a fixed position in a sleeve. In
most drilling machines, the spindle is vertical and the work is supported on a horizontal table.
The sleeve or quill assembly does not revolve but can slide in its bearing in a direction parallel to
its axis. When the sleeve carrying the spindle with a drilling tool is lowered, the drilling tool is
fed into the work: and when it is moved upward, the drilling tool is withdrawn from the work.
Feed pressure applied to the sleeve by hand or power causes the revolving drill to cut its way into
the work a few thousandths of an inch per revolution. In this research, this automatic drilling
machine is to drill the holes from one location to some other location. So, the machine is mainly

corresponding to the automatic drilling system. Control system of an automatic drilling machine
is commonly used to produce PCB circuit board for industry, and domestic consumption. In this
research control system of an automatic drilling machine actuated with DC motor and stepper
motors are designed and implemented; and driven from basic pro program are developed for
programming and controlling the designed drill machine. The keypad is used to command the
values of coordinates such as X, Y, Z axes. Firstly, the object must be placed on the board. The
sensor will sense the X, Y, Z axis arrives or not in their positions to start the drilling process. If
the three axes are at zero position, it will be started to move and drill. The drill down to the
object to create the hole on the desired position and then drilling process is completed. This
operation can make the factory automation to be a completed process. The LCD (16x4) is used as
the output display. It can be display the name of the machine, the X, Y, Z values and drill result.
Proper drilling process is needed to ensure their position sustainability is actually being reached.
Block diagram of control system of an automatic drilling machine is shown in Fig

Block Diagram of control system of an automatic

drilling machine.
Current development in industry has been towards computer controlled manu- facturing to
increase quality and quantity of products. Manual manufacturing of such items as the circuit
board will have a big faulty case and uneven quality. Then have developed an automatic print
circuit board drilling machine, which is controlled by computer. The main aim of the project lies
in interfacing or in simple words, is to make a mechanical system work, making use of a

personal computer of basic con_guration, this project is carried on keeping in mind the needs of
a small scale industry, which need small sized components in a few number, which by other
processes would cost them more. This project makes use of a printed circuit board that interfaces
a drilling machine with a personal computer through a bu_er. This system is mainly aimed at
small scale production of printed circuit boards in small scale industries The system has an
advantage of simplicity in operation, moreover the cost of production comes down for a small
scale sector. Though the system involves many small electronic parts it is easy to study the
working, and in operation, as use the simple user-friendly language in programming the
software.
Basic Design Concept
The goal here is to design and build a very low-cost, very simple, desktop drilling machine,
which is used for drilling the PCB's (printed circuit boards). Drilling the PCB's manually
consumes lot of time and due to errors by drilling at wrong points, causes wasting many PCB's.
All these problems can be avoided by implementing CNC concept, there by this project work is
taken up and a prototype module is constructed for the live demonstration. Since it is a prototype
module, size of the work or drilling size of the PCB is minimized. Due to the restriction, the
machine cannot drill PCB of more than 12x20 cm.The platform which moves in X, Y directions
is made out of clear see through type of Acrylic sheet of 5 mm thick is used, the idea of using
this sheet is to have a clear visibility of the other mechanism, which is below the plat form. A
thermo coal sheet of same size can be arranged over the plat form and the job (the PCB which is
supposed to be drilled) can be kept over the thermo coal with some _xing arrangement. The
mechanical transmission section to drive the X, Y table is designed with Sliding channels with
ball bearings, the whole mechanism of X, Y table is designed with two stepper motors, four
sliding channels, two screw rods of 12 mm, end plates to hold screw rods, 12 mm nuts loaded
with MS (mild steel) plates, etc. When the motor rotates, screw rod also rotates and moves the
MS plate, which is loaded with 12 mm nut. Depending up on the motor speed, MS plate travels
along with screw rod at certain speed. And depending up on the motor shaft rotation direction
(clockwise or anti clockwise) 12 mm nut along with plate moves in both the directions, i.e.,
forward or reverse. Likewise with the help of two stepper motors, the X, Y table moves in X, Y
directions. Another sliding channel is used and it is arranged in vertical direction for drill
machine, which moves in `Z' direction. In general the mechanical construction slightly di_ers

with this machine, the detailed description is as follows. A computer-controlled drilling machine
requires a device that guarantees that the drill lands repeatable at the speci_ed point. This device
should be _rmly _xed to the machine and in any case designed to make precise alignment easy.
Introduction to Concept
The system uses three pivots, two for moving the X, Y table for positioning the job (the circuit
board) at speci_ed coordinate and one for the drilling mechanism. This allows any desired point
on the circuit board to be brought into range on the turntable. This system has the big advantage
over a linear construction that only two bearing points are needed whose exact separation is the
only quantity that needs to be known. This requires no expensive specialist components: the
bearings simply have to remain vertical and free of play. [Refer_figure]

Automatic PC-Based Drilling Machine

The Stepper Motor Drives by Computer

Stepper motors are very di_erent from a regular DC motors. Instead of spinning like DC motors
do stepper motor steps at a speci_c resolution for each pulse. The motor that are using needs 200
steps / pulses just to complete a single revolution which should be enough to tell about its
precision. Another advantage of stepper motors is the fact that their speed of rotation can be
achieved almost instantly even if you change the spinning direction. Stepper motor consists of a
rotor - the permanent magnet that rotates inside, and stator - four coils (north, east, south, and

west) that are part of the case, and which don't move. Rotor can be moved by sequentially
applying a pulsed DC voltage to one or two coils at a time. In order to move the rotor it requires
a driver. Driver is a circuit that applies a voltage to any of the four-stator coils. To drive the
stepper motor in both the directions (clockwise or anti-clockwise) the system is programmed to
produce the pulses in a sequence at four di_erent outputs (9, 5, 6, A). These sequential
programmed outputs energize the motor windings one after another in a sequence.
Numerical Control Machine Drives
The complete circuit diagram of the project work is provided at the end of this chapter, the
following is the brief description about the circuit design.
Stepper Motor Driver Circuit
This is an easy to build stepper motor driver that will precisely control a uni-polar stepper motor
through the micro controller. In order to move the rotor driving circuit is required. Driver is a
circuit that applies a voltage to any of the four-stator coils. Driver can be built with four
Darlington transistors or four power MOSFETS. Here the circuit is designed with power
MOSFETS and its pre-driver. The pre-driver is used to switch the power MOSFET e_ectively.
It has the following objectives:
1. To develop core technology of PC based CNC control system,
2. To explore new concept of integration of CNC control with adaptive feedback control for
intelligent material processing,
3. To develop a prototype of open architecture PC-based CNC control system.

Brief Description about Micro-controllers

Introduction
A Micro controller consists of a powerful CPU tightly coupled with memory, various I/O
interfaces such as serial port, parallel port timer or counter, interrupt controller, data acquisition
interfaces-A/D converter, D/A converter, integrated on to a single silicon chip. If a system is
developed with a microprocessor, the designer has to go for external memory such as RAM,
ROM, EPROM and peripherals. But controller is provided all these facilities on a single chip.
Development of a Micro controller reduces PCB size and cost of design. One of the major
di_erences between a Microprocessor and a Micro controller is that a controller often deals with
bits not bytes as in the real world application.
Features of 8051 Architecture
1. Optimized 8 bit CPU for control applications and extensive Boolean processing capabilities.
2. 64K Program Memory address space.
3. 64K Data Memory address space.
4. 128 bytes of on chip Data Memory.
5. 32 Bi-directional and individually addressable I/O lines.
6. Two 16 bit timer/counters.
7. Full Duplex UART.
8. 6-source / 5-vector interrupt structure with priority levels.
9. On chip clock oscillator.
8051 Micro-controller Architecture
The 8051 architecture consists of these speci_c features:
1. EightBit CPU with registers A (the accumulator) and B
2. Sixteen-bit program counter (PC) and data pointer (DPTR)
3. Eight- bit stack pointer (PSW)

4. Eight-bit stack pointer (Sp)

5. Internal ROM or EPROM (8751) of 0(8031) to 4K (8051)
6. Internal RAM of 128 bytes: (1)Four register banks, each containing eight registers, (2)Sixteen
bytes, which maybe addressed at the bit level, (3)Eighty bytes of general- purpose data memory.
7. Thirty two input/output pins arranged as four 8-bit ports: P0-P3
8. Two 16-bit timer/counters: T0 and T1
9. Full duplex serial data receiver/transmitter: SBUF
10. Control registers: TCON, TMOD, SCON, PCON, IP, and IE
11. Two external and three internal interrupts sources.
12. Oscillator and clock circuits.

Brief Description about Max 232

Introduction
In order to connect micro-controller to a modem or a PC to modem a serial port is used. Serial is
a very common protocol for device communication that is standard on almost every PC. Most
computers include two RS-232 based serial ports. Serial is also a common communication
protocol that is used by many devices for instrumentation numerous GPIB-compatible devices
also come with an RS-232 port. Furthermore, serial communication is used for data acquisition
in conjunction with a remote sampling device. The concept of serial communication is simple.
The serial port sends and receives bytes of information one bit at a time. Although this is slower
than parallel communication, which allows the transmission of an entire byte at once, it is
simpler and can be used over long distances.

About RS-232
RS-232(ANSI/EIA-232 Standard) is serial connection found on IBM-compatible PC's.It is used
for many purposes, such as connecting a mouse, printer, or modem, as well as industrial
instrumentation. Because of improvements in line drivers and cables, applications often increase
the performance of RS-232 beyond the distance and speed listed in the standard. RS-232 is
limited to point- to-point connections between PC serial ports and devices. RS-232 hardware can
be used for serial communication up to distance of 50 feet.
Hardware Details
1. Atmel 89C51 Micro-controller chip
2. MAX 232
3. 7805 Voltage Regulator
4. BC547 NPN Transistors
5. Z44 Por MOSFET

Hardware

PROBLEM STATEMENT
This paper discusses the development of automatic drilling machine for PCB. After
etching process, the PCB is placed to this system then it is drilled automatically. The same
system has been made but the controller is PC and it uses the pc software to read the text file
which is generated by the PCB design software [1]. Another system uses the basic 8051
micrcontroller and drilling driver which is designed by relays makes system bulky and does not
provide high amount of current in order to drive the motor properly [2].The another method uses
microcontroller , the c programming and Vb.net as software. The system consist of three 3
stepper motor and one AC motor for controlling drill . Thus these leads to complication in the
system and system become instable[3] The proposed project does not use the path planning
method. Further the drilling machine uses a path planning algorithm, which is capable of
estimating an efficient traversing path for the drill bit minimizing the length of travel. The path
planning algorithm optimizes the use of the motors and other mechanical paths involved in the
process while reducing total time taken to traverse all the drill holes. In this project, the
developed software takes the drill hole position of the PCB. Than it calculates the necessary
parameters and sends the coordinate information to Arduino board AVR microcontroller unit
(MCU) over USB cable. Stepper motors move the mechanism to accomplish the drilling of the
PCB.

Single spindle drilling Machine:

One of the simplest numerically controlled machine tools is the single spindle drilling machine.
Most drilling machines are programmed on three axis : a.

The X axis controls the table movement to the right and left. b.

They Y axis controls the table movement towards or away from the column. c.

The Z axis controls the movement of spindle up and down to drill holes. As manufacturers are
under tremendous pressure to improve product quality in terms of accuracy, dimension while
maintaining high productivity, they need to address numerous problems in machine tools those
affect the production, accuracy, increased time level during operation stages. Solving those
problems or to develop CNC machine is a huge challenge. This project aims to fabricate the
model of CNC drilling machine which can help to develop machine of the industry grade.
Theory of interfacing the machine tools with computer through electronics manipulation circuit
supplying the distributed power supply to run the various parts of the machine is to be studied to
develop the model. It also aims to provide friendly GUI (Graphic User Interface) for easy
operation. II.

THE FLOW OF PROJECT

The first of project is to design the basic component of machine. The dimensions of the frame
are decided. Then in second step a prototype is modeled for checking the complete assembly.
After modeling actual fabrication of machine is done. Simultaneously for getting signals from
computer a motor drive is designed and GUI is created.

LITERATURE SURVEY

DESIGN AND BUILD AN AUTOMATIC PCB

DRILLING MACHINE
Nguyen Huu Phuong, Ho Van Thoi
Electronics & Computer Center
University of Natural Sciences, Vietnam National University HCM
Creating holes on single or multilayer printed circuit boards (PCBs) is an important stage
in electronic production. Holes of different sizes and at a large number of positions (up to
thousands) must be drilled with high precision for manual or automatic insertion of various
electronic devices and components. For this purpose, we have designed and built an automatic
PCB drilling machine. The PCB pattern of the circuit schematic diagram is drawn on the monitor
screen, with the help of a software such as Orcad. This pattern layout is printed out to make the
PCB, and its just from this layout the computer will control the drilling automatically. At a time
the system can make holes on several boards stacked together. There are many foreign made
PCB drilling machines of different quality that we could have imported, but because of their high
price and, moreover, we wanted to build a robust machine with a large span (can accommodate
boards up to 50 cm in width) for making holes, or making printed boards (board etching), and as
a demonstrating CNC machine (by changing corresponding working head). The project has been
completed and put in use (making small scale PCBs and teaching) Automated Pcb Drilling
Machine With Efficient Path Planning
Shaikh NoorFarooque1, Ansari Mohammed Faizan2, Javed Shaikh3, Pragati Pal4
Students, M.H.Saboo Siddik College of Engineering, University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India1, 2,
3Assistant Professor, M.H. Saboo Siddik College of Engineering, University of Mumbai,
Mumbai, India4
This paper presents the design of a PCB drilling machine, where the drill holes are
automatically detected from an image of the circuit eliminating the need to manually enter the
drill hole coordinates. The goal of this project is to design and implement an Arduino controlled

PCB drilling machine. Further the drilling machine uses path planning method which is used to
make the system more stable and accurate.
Automatic Drilling Machine for Printed Circuit Board
H. Ferdinando, I. N. Sandjaja, G. Sanjaya
Department of Electrical Engineering Petra Christian University
Using Printed Circuit Board (PCB) in the electronics instrumentation is common. In the
experiment phase, not the final phase, one has to drill the hole and via by himself. The number of
holes and vias in the PCB influence the speed of drilling time if it is done manually. The idea is
to implement an automatic drilling machine. The system consists of two main parts, i.e. software
in PC and the drilling machine itself. The coordinates for holes and vias were generated by PCB
drawing software as text file. PC will extract and then send them to the machine via RS-232
connection. The drilling machine is equipped with MCS-51 family minimum system. This
controls the mechanism of the drilling machine. To move the drill to the specific location, two
stepper motor are used. This makes the control system in open loop. From the experiments, Xand Y-axes have different error, i.e. 2.34% and 4.34% respectively. This is due to the bending in
worm system connected between the motor and the mechanics. For 90 holes (9x10) with 100
mils distance, the average time is around 5 minutes

The mechanics of the system

Control System of an Automatic Drilling Machine

MAY PHUE PHUE LWIN
, KYAW THIHA
PG Scholar, Dept of Mechatronic Engineering , Mandalay Technological University, Mandalay,
Myanmar,
Assoc Prof, Dept of Mechatronic Engineering, Mandalay Technological University, Mandalay,
Myanmar,
Creating holes on the objects or circuit boards is an important stage in electronic
production. Holes of different sizescand at a large number of positions must be drilled with high
precision for manual or automatic insertion of various electroniccdevices and components. For
this purpose, it has designed and built an automatic drilling machine. The values of the
coordinate points are typed on the keypad, with the help of software such as micro code studio.

At a time the system can make holes on several holes together. This research describes control
system of an automatic drilling machine. Three motors are used to move the axes such as X, Y,
Z. They are placed in the Cartesian shape on the frame. PIC 16F887 is used to compare the
output voltage from the motor driver circuit. PIC generates output signal to the LCD and motors.
LCD (16x4) is used to display the values of X, Y, Z coordinates that intend to drill. By using
LCD, user can know which points are drilled on the object. DC motor is used to drill the object
when coordinates reach their values. This system is, especially, used to make (PCB) printed
circuit board in industry. By applying this machine in production industry, it can bring the multi
production in short time.

DESIGN IDEA
There are three kinds of holes for device insertion, via holes and fringe holes for board
fixing. Each hole has two parameters: Position and size (diameter). Hole quality is also
important. Hole position consists of X-Y coordinates measured from monitor screen upper left
corner. These parameters are used to position the drilling bit, whereas size parameter is used to
choose bit size (usually 0.7mm, 0.8mm . . .). Hole data file supplied by the electronic software is
for controlling the drilling machine. The drill (comprising motor, chuck, and bit) is moved
horizontally to X-Y coordinates of a hole, then moved down in Z direction to make the hole, then
withdrawn and translated to another place. The electro-mechanical system is responsible for the
3D motion to position the drill, and should be of real industry standard to guarantee
force,

torque,

the

precision, robustness . . . requirements. The idea was to choose stepper motors

and linear axes for the electro-mechanical system. Servo motors are more appropriate but
stepper motors are more convenient. Figure 1 is the general model of the drilling machine
resulted from above ideas.

III. MACHINE ELEMENTS

Every machine comprises different elements. To comprise this model of the CNC machine
following elements has to be fabricate and assemble. Machine Elements:

1. Frame Structure Base, Column, Table, Head,

2. Mechanical Drive for Power Transmission
3. Stepper motors to position table at given X and Y coordinates.
4. DC / Stepper Motors for Up and Down movement of the head tool
5. Bearings.

1.

Stepper motors

A stepper motor or step motor or stepping motor is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a
full rotation into a number of equal steps. The motor's position can then be commanded to move
and hold at one of these steps without any feedback sensor (an open-loop controller), as long as
the motor is carefully sized to the application in respect to torque and speed.
What is a stepper motor?
A Stepper Motor or a step motor is a brushless, synchronous motor which divides a full rotation
into a number of steps. Unlike a brushless DC motor which rotates continuously when a fixed
DC voltage is applied to it, a step motor rotates in discrete step angles. The Stepper Motors
therefore are manufactured with steps per revolution of 12, 24, 72, 144, 180, and 200, resulting
in stepping angles of 30, 15, 5, 2.5, 2, and 1.8 degrees per step. The stepper motor can be
controlled with or without feedback.

Stepper or Step MotorsStepper or Step Motors

How a stepper motor works?

Stepper motors work on the principle of electromagnetism. There is a soft iron or magnetic rotor
shaft surrounded by the electromagnetic stators. The rotor and stator have poles which may be
teethed or not depending upon the type of stepper. When the stators are energized the rotor
moves to align itself along with the stator (in case of a permanent magnet type stepper) or moves
to have a minimum gap with the stator (in case of a variable reluctance stepper). This way the
stators are energized in a sequence to rotate the stepper motor. Get more information about
working of stepper motors through interesting images at the stepper motor Insight.

How Stepper Motor works

Types of Stepper Motor

By construction the step motors come into three broad classes:
1.

Permanent Magnet Stepper

2.

Variable Reluctance Stepper

3.

Hybrid Step Motor

These three types have been explained in detail in the following sections.
Switched reluctance motors are very large stepping motors with a reduced pole count, and
generally are closed-loop commutated. A stepper motor (or stepping motor) transforms applied
voltage pulses into discrete motions called steps. It allows precise control of position and speed
without, generally, the need of feedback. This reduces the complexity of the control. Figure 2
describes a simplified stepper motor control system. The stator windings are excited according
to groups which are called phases. Motors can be of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 phases. The number of pole
pairs determines the rotation angle for each step or the number of steps for each revolution.
Depending on the excitation to motor phases, the motor will operate in one these 3 modes: Full
stepping, Half stepping, and Micro stepping. The rotation director is decided by the order of
winding excitation.
We selected the 3-phase stepper motors VRDM 397/50 LWB of SIG-POSITEC . The 3-phase
type is a tradeoff between 2-phase and 5-phase motors. It has large power, simple wiring
connection, and can reach 200/400 steps/rev (same as 2-phase type) or 500/1000 steps/rev (same
as 5-phase type). Besides, the number of steps can be increased 10 times (micro steps) to become
2000, 4000, 5000, or 10,000 steps/rev. Some main specifications are as follows:

Number of steps per revolution (z): 200/400/500/2000/4000/5000.

Rotation angle (o): 1.8/0.9/0.72/0.30/0.18/0.09/0.072/0.036
Sustaining torque (MH): 226Ncm
Nominal current/winding (IW): 1.75A
Supply voltage (U): 325VDC

2. Coupling
The coupling between motor axis and load has a strong impact on the operation of the motor and
efficiency of the system. The manufacturer recommends anti-twisting coupling for high
resolution positioning systems. When the precision requirement is not so severe, flexible
coupling is acceptable, with an advantage in that it can compensate for the linear offset of the
axes.

3. Power drive
Power drive is a power electronic circuit to supply switching currents to motor windings. In
figure 2 the power drive is represented by 4 power transistors. Actual power drivers are more
complex. We used Power drive D901 (single) and D902 (dual) of SIG-POSITEC. The automatic
drilling machine comprises 3 stepper motors for X, Ymotions (Figure 1). Power drive D901 is
for Z-axis motor, while D902 is for X-axis and Y-axis motors.

Electro-mechanical positioning linear axes

An axe converts rotational motion of motor into linear translation. We chose high precision axes
from FESTO (Germany) detailed as follows:
For Y axis translation: DGEL 40 500 SP
For X axis translation: DGEL 40 400 SP
The axes use internal spindle and ball bearings, and transfer internal linear motion to an outside
slide which moves along a rigid guide. The axes can be placed at any direction, and can operate
in sliding mode (load presses onto slide) or yoke mode (load pulls on slide). Some main
specifications are as shown in Table 1.

CONTROL CIRCUIT
1 Controller
Figures 3 shows that we need a logic controller which can be a computer, PLC, or
microcontroller (MC). Microcontroller was chosen because it is cheap and satisfies control
requirements. AT89C51 of ATMEL is 8-bit microcontroller of CMOS technology with 128 byte
RAM, 4k byte flash ROM, 32 I/O lines organized into 4 ports, 2 16-bit counter timers ... The
flash ROM stores the monitor program and hole data file (for NC system see later), and the
RAM is for the controller to run programs. Each hole needs 3 bytes of data, the flash ROM can
thus store data for about 1000 holes.

Figure 5 shows the microcontroller and five

signal groups:
Inputs to operate the microcontroller.
Control inputs.
Inputs from sensors: Each X, Y, linear axis is equipped with two magnetic proximity switches.
Outputs to power drives.
Output control to drill.

4. Drilling motor
The motor is also a very important part of the whole system. It must satisfy requirements such
as: high power, strong starting torque, high revolving speed (e.g. 10,000 revolutions/minute). The
motor and bit axes must be on the same vertical direction.

12v High Speed Torque Micro Brush DC Motor Manufacturers FROM 6000 RPM TO10000
RPM.

5.

Display

The display of X-Y coordinates and of some operation conditions are necessary for monitoring
the system.
6. Stabilized power supplies
The power source includes:
325V 10A for the 3 power drive
26,5V 3A for the drilling motor
24V 1A for the supplying control logic levels to the power drive
12V 1A for the limit sensors and display block
5V 1A for the microcontroller

7.

NC AND CNC SYSTEMS

The automatic drilling machine can be configured as a NC (Numerical Control) or a

CNC (Computer Numerical Control) system. In NC system the PCB file of computer is
converted to hole data file which is then converted to the form of data appropriate for the
microcontroller (MC). This data and the monitor program are loaded into MC flash ROM. The
control of the drilling machine is from the MC not from the computer. When we want to change
the PCB pattern, then the new PCB file is downloaded to the flash ROM again. Figure 6
describes the NC system. In CNC system the computer directly controls the drilling machine
and receives feedbacks from it. The MC is still useful. The computer displays X-Y coordinates of
the drill and several other operation states.

HARDWARE DESIGN
The system is controlled by using Arduino Uno board in order to achieve the control over the
movement axis . Several motor drivers are made, two for stepper motor (Xand Y-axis), one for
DC motor (Z-axis) and one for the drill. The drivers use optocoupler to isolate the digital
system from the analog one.

Proposed model of system

The machines have designed with three movements coordinate, X, Y and Z as shows in Fig. 5.
Hole position consists of X-Y coordinates, and Z coordinate is a parameter to move the drill
machines up and down. The drill is moved horizontally to X-Y coordinates of a hole, moved
down in Z direction to make the hole, then withdrawn and translated to another place. Drill
coordinates are extracted using matlab and send to arduino uno board.

FABRICATION
Fabrication of the machine includes firstly the fabrication of the mechanical components which
includes fabrication of the base of the machine made up of cast Iron, the X- table, Y- table and
the column to hold the drilling tool. The X and the Y movement of the table is achieved with the
help of the lead screw assembly which is driven by the stepper motors fitted on the respective
tables. The Z movement of the drilling tool is also achieved with the help of lead screw assembly
which is again driven with the help of stepper motors. The power from the motor to the lead
screw assembly is transmitted with the help of the gearing mechanism with different gear ratios.
Next is the fabrication of the electronics circuit which includes the power circuit, driver circuits,
the microcontroller circuits etc. The stepper motors are controlled by the software program
which is achieved by the interfacing between the machine and the computer.

COMPUTER INTERFACING
Computer Interfacing is a boundary across which two independent system meet and act on or
communicate with each other. In computer interfacing there are several types of interfaces:
1) User Interface: The user interface allows the user to communicate with the operating system.
The communication is done by keyboard, mouse etc.
2) Software Interface: Software interface includes the languages and codes that the applications
use to communicate with each other and with hardware.
3) Hardware Interface: Hardware interface is related with data transfer of one hardware device to
other. This includes communication through the wires plugs and sockets. This project consists of
all interfaces. The user interface and software interface are created through visual basic language.
The data transfer is done by using parallel port.

SOFTWARE DESIGN
The design and implementation of these project is divided into two parts hardware design and
software design . The main challenges of this project were path planning and obtaining the drill
hole coordinates from a PCB layout. We used the MATLAB to write the program and the
EAGLE PCB layout development software was used to design the PCB schematic.

A. GET THE PCB LAYOUT

In these propose method the first step in the block diagram is getting the PCB layout. This is
simply done by getting an image of the drill plot using a web camera or as a bitmap image
produced by the PCB design software. A simple enough task for a beginner in PCB designing as
is our goal.

Original pcb layout

B. EXTRACTING THE DRILL COORDINATES
Once the image is obtained it is loaded into the MATLAB program which will extract the
coordinates for plotting. The logic used is to find all the connected points using the circular
hough transform and then to find the centroids of each point as the point of drilling. The Hough
transform (HT) can be used to detect lines, circles or other parametric curves.

Image with circles detected

C. ROW BY ROW SCANNING METHOD
In the this algorithm the pointer moves up along the y axis keeping the x coordinate zero from
the smallest y coordinate in the array up to the largest. As it reaches each y coordinate the pointer
will move along the x axis keeping the y coordinate constant until it reaches each point
corresponding to that y coordinate. It will then return back to the y axis after it has covered all
the points having that particular y coordinate. In this way the pointer will reach each point by
moving sequential up the y axis and along the x axis much like a type writer

APPLICATION

Used in large industries

ADVANTAGES

Efficiency and accuracy is high

Quick process i.e saves lots of time
Easy to handle through computer

DISADVANTAGES

Heavy and bulky, requires large space

CONCLUSION
We have designed and built an automatic PCB drilling machine having a rigid mechanical
base, robust electro mechanical parts, and an effective control electronic circuitry. Still there
are some refinements and improvements need to be done.