A precision EDM drilling machine with a custom UI
For Almax easyLab's uDrill Pro, we turned a customer prototype into a product, with electronics that doubled as a research platform and a smooth touchscreen interface built around a live camera image.
- Client
- Almax easyLab
- Year
- 2023
- Services
- Electronics design, Firmware
The challenge
The uDrill Pro drills holes between 0.02 mm and 1 mm wide into metal gaskets for high-pressure research. It uses electrical discharge machining (EDM): small sparks remove material without touching it, so the hole ends up within a few microns of where it should be.
To aim that precisely, the operator works from a magnified live video feed of the gasket on a 7-inch touchscreen, positioning the drilling head and following the drilling as it happens. The interface also has to work both for a first-time user following step-by-step guidance and for an expert adjusting depth and drilling energy.
That made the interface the heart of the product. It had to look good and feel instant, while the same hardware processed the camera’s video in real time. A touchscreen that lags behind your finger, or a camera image that stutters while you position to within microns, makes a precision tool hard to trust.
The project started with a proof of concept that the customer had built with an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi.
What we did
We turned that proof of concept into a product, designing a custom board that houses the power supplies, video processing, stepper motor drivers and EDM circuitry.
Some of the underlying physics still needed research when the design started. Rather than waiting for those answers and adding extra board revisions, we designed the board so it could do as much testing and research as possible in one iteration. We did this by adding stuffing options (spots for alternative components that can be fitted or left out) and many debug and measurement points.
We wrote the firmware and the user interface. A real-time co-processor keeps both the interface and the stepper motor movement smooth, and the video processing is split up to run in parallel on several CPU cores.
We also used printed circuit boards as the sample and drill holders. That makes them clean, professional consumables that are easy to mass-produce.
Beyond the design
Our work didn’t stop at the design. We supplied the first batches of the main processing boards and the PCB sample holders ourselves, so the uDrill Pro could reach its first customers before production moved to an external supplier.
The result
The uDrill Pro is on the market today as part of Almax easyLab’s range of tools for high-pressure research. Or, as Almax puts it: a hole in one.
