Spindle Camera

While trying to drill very small holes in punches I thought it would be easier to align the drill bit with the centre of the punch if I had a camera that could be used to do the alignment. There's quite a few spindle camera designs on the web, and I found one that used a particular webcam, so I bought one. I then dismantled it:

The PCB had its microphone removed and also the LEDs that could be used for illumination. The problem with them was that the didn't fit in the case I found on Thingiverse, and also that the LEDs were not pointing at the subject when looking at very small items.

I then printed the Thingiverse spindle cam case I found, after I'd modified it for the smaller collet nut I have on the engraver.

The PCB is held by the two halves of the case which are bolted together.

The collet nut slides into the back of the case and there's enough friction there to hold it while adjusting the alignment.

This is the camera on the spindle:

I used some dots on a white background and the trails feature of the camera script that was on Thingiverse. It seemed to work well once I had printed a holder that was a tighter fit on the collett nut.

It was then fairly easy to align the spindle on the end of a punch, then put a 0.1mm drill bit in and have a go at drilling a hole:

You can see some chips at the base of the drill there. The first attempt snapped the drill bit on removal just as it was nearly done. Not sure why, maybe too fast an extraction speed on the peck cycle.

I had another go and all worked well that time. This is a video of the camera output while drilling another punch hole.

These pictures were taken with the camera out of the spindle and held in a marking base I recently bought: