Category Archives: drill

NASA Remotely Hacks Curiosity’s Rock Drill

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We have a lot of respect for the hackers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). When their stuff has a problem, it is often millions of miles away and yet they often find a way to fix it anyway. Case in point is the Curiosity Mars rover. Back in 2016, the probe’s rock drill broke. This is critical because one of the main things the rover does is drill into rock samples, collect the powder and subject it to analysis. JPL announced they had devised a way to successfully drill again.

The drill failed after fifteen uses. It uses two …read more

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Painless ODBC + dplyr Connections to Amazon Athena and Apache Drill with R & odbc

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I spent some time this morning upgrading the JDBC driver (and changing up some supporting code to account for changes to it) for my metis package🔗 which connects R up to Amazon Athena via RJDBC. I’m used to JDBC and have to deal with Java… Continue reading Painless ODBC + dplyr Connections to Amazon Athena and Apache Drill with R & odbc→

DIY Drill-Powered Water Pump

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Whether you need to pump water out of your basement this spring, or just want to have fun shooting water around in the yard this summer, here’s a way to build a pump instead of buying one. This is a simple but ingenious build, and [NavinK30] did everything shy of machining his own hardware and making his own tools. Well, it looks as if he might have made that drill.

As you’ll see in his how-to after the break, this centrifugal pump is mostly acrylic, PVC, and fasteners. [Navin] cut two sides and a base for the paddles from acrylic, …read more

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What to do with Your Brand New Ultrasonic Transducer

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We wager you haven’t you heard the latest from ultrasonics. Sorry. [Lindsay Wilson] is a Hackaday reader who wants to share his knowledge of transducer tuning to make tools. The bare unit he uses to demonstrate might attach to the bottom of an ultrasonic cleaner tank, which have a different construction than the ones used for distance sensing. The first demonstration shows the technique for finding a transducer’s resonant frequency and this technique is used throughout the video. On the YouTube page, his demonstrations are indexed by title and time for convenience.

For us, the most exciting part is when …read more

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Power Your Guitar Pedals With Drill Batteries

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Guitar pedals are a great way to experiment with the sound of your instrument. However, they require electricity, and when you’re using more than a couple, it can get messy. Some will run on batteries, while others are thirstier for more current and will only work with a plugback. There are a great many solutions out there, but most people with more than a few pedals to power will end up going to some kind of mains powered solution. [Don] is here to show us that it’s not the only way.

Mains power is great for some things, but where …read more

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Drill the Wet Side Wet and the Dry Side Dry

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Working mostly in metal as he does, [Tuomas Soikkeli] has invested in some nice tools. So when his sweet magnetic-base drill was in need of a new home, he built this two-in-one drilling station to maximize shop space and add some versatility to boot.

For the non-metalworkers out there, a mag-base drill is basically a portable drill press where the base is replaced with a strong electromagnet like the one shown here. They’re often used in the construction trades to drill holes in steel beams or columns, and often include nice features like a built-in coolant system.

[Tuomas] effectively turned …read more

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Mini Drill Made From a Motor

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We love this hacked-together mini drill by [BuenaTec] that uses a DC7.2V 10K-RPM motor with a 1/8” Dremel chuck added on. Power is supplied by a USB-A cable with the data wires cut off, with a switch controlling the voltage and a rectifier diode protecting the USB port or battery pack from back voltage from the motor.

The drill isn’t very powerful, only able to bore holes in PCBs, plastic, and similar soft materials. However, you could see how just a couple more components could make it even more robust — maybe a speed controller and voltage booster? Even so, …read more

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BeamCNC: Computer-Controlled Construction System Mill

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Need to make something quick and dirty out of wooden beams, and want to use elements you know will work together? BeamCNC is a mobile assembly of stepper-controlled rollers and a router that sucks a 2×2 through it and drills the holes in pre-programmed intervals. Currently being developed as part of an Indiegogo campaign currently in preview, its creator [Vladislav Lunachev] has declared it open source hardware. It’s essentially a CNC mill that makes Grid Beam, a classic DIY building set that resembles Meccano, Erector, and other classic sets, only made full-scale for larger projects. While BeamCNC is not affiliated …read more

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Smooth and Steady Cuts with an Improvised Power Feeder

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Some woodworking operations require stock to be fed at a smooth, steady rate, for which purpose a power feeder is usually employed. They’re expensive bits of gear, though, and their cost can usually be borne only by high-output production shops. But when you need one, you need one, and hacking a power feeder from a drill and a skate wheel is a viable option.

It should come as no surprise that this woodshop hack comes to us from [Matthias Wandel], who never seems to let a woodworking challenge pass him by. His first two versions of expedient power feeders were …read more

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Cutting Stone with a Diamond Bit Built from Plumbing parts

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Everyone’s favorite Canadian is at it again. This time, [AVE] needed to cut a large hole in a stone countertop. They making coring bits for this, but a bit this size would cost upwards of $400. Not a problem. [AvE] broke out the tools and built his own stone cutting bit.

Everything starts with a 6″ plastic pipe cap. [AvE] center drilled the cap, then threaded it. A turned down bolt makes a great arbor for this new tool. The edge of the cap was then slotted. [AvE] used a clapped out Bridgeport milling machine, but you could do the …read more

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