Tangent Angle Finder Tool for a Mill

[nova_robotics]

This little tool for a mill will allow you to find points tangent to a curve for any small angle you'd like. This one is good to about 35 degrees, but if you take your time you may be able to produce one that's better. It's a very easy tool to make. I hope someone finds this useful.

[DIYer]

Thanks nova_robotics! We've added your Tangent Angle Finder to our Digital Readouts category,
as well as to your builder page: nova_robotics's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Tangent Angle Finder by nova_robotics

tags: angle, measurement

[flyfr8rs]

Curious what DRO that is?

[nova_robotics]

Curious what DRO that is?

It's called TouchDRO and it's spectacular. It runs on Android and will do visualizations of your part in real time. It's almost halfway to CNC. I love it more than my family.

[flyfr8rs]

Thanks, I looked it up and it looks very interesting - I've got a relatively new to me Lagun mill that I'm shopping for a DRO; most are too expensive for me. The TouchDRO looks really good and substantially less $$ (and open source!). I'd be curious what scales you chose for your install (glass or magnetic?). Source? Thanks for any help!

[nova_robotics]

Thanks, I looked it up and it looks very interesting - I've got a relatively new to me Lagun mill that I'm shopping for a DRO; most are too expensive for me. The TouchDRO looks really good and substantially less $$ (and open source!). I'd be curious what scales you chose for your install (glass or magnetic?). Source? Thanks for any help!

I used dirty old capacitive scales from iGaging, mostly because I already had those already installed from the previous cheapo DRO. They work good, but if I were doing it again from scratch I would probably go with glass. With the iGaging scales you have to open them up and solder in a little decoupling capacitor or else the readings jump around. They remain accurate and the scales don't lose tracking, but every once in a while the DRO will jump from 43.2mm to 30000mm for a split second, then jump back. Stuff like that. The filter cap helps that out.

The worst part was trying to find a decent Android touchscreen tablet. I tried a bunch of older tablets, Raspberry Pi stuff, and some other SBCs. They all sucked. I ended up using an "All-in-One" from FriendlyArm. It's not fast and they're low on RAM, but they're big and work good. I bought two. One for my lathe and one for my mill. Then I mounted them on articulating TV arm things.

Anyway TouchDRO is amazing and I highly recommend it. It's a huge upgrade for a manual mill.