A point of clarification on the use of a drill press with a side cutting bit (i.e. end mill or router bit). For me the primary concern is that drill press chucks are generally held in place by friction. More specifically the chuck and drill press have a Jacobs taper interface. With side load and vibration the chuck could literally fall out of the drill press during a cut.
Hmm. A Jacobs taper is a pretty strong self-holding taper. My chief difficulty has been getting them apart when I want to. (I ended up buying a pair of U-tapers for this purpose before I was set up sufficiently in my machine shop to make my own.)
In this case, @FundyFlutes is moving slow with a small sharp end mill in wood. While I generally agree on principle and would never recommend anyone to start using a drill press for light milling, it’s already been working for him for a long time and his purpose here is to ask for help with the electronics for something that’s been working for him for a long time. Unlikely to start failing just from changing how the table is driven. 
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I’ve been using this milling table on the drill press for almost 3 years, manually operated. I have not had any problems at all with the machinery part of it. The jobs are quite small and light weight and I have never loaded down the milling head enough to cause any vibrations. I have never even heard the motor slow down or anything that suggests that undue force is being applied. The pieces of wood I am working on are typically about 1” x 3.5” x 1/4” thick. I am primarily aiming for a finished surface smooth and flat enough not to require any sanding so I’m advancing quite slowly and not any deeper than 1 mm depth of cut. Usually less. I do a few passes to arrive at the required depth. It’s a job that requires precision over speed.
The primary reason I have for motorizing the milling table has to do with repetitive stress injuries to my right thumb. That is the hand that controls the lengthwise left-right cutting passes and caused my to lose the use of my thumb for about 5 months. Each time I used the milling table I end up rotating the feed knobs thousands of turns. Not much pressure or force. Just the same motion thousands of times. It’s surprising the number of simple daily tasks that I can’t do without my right thumb. Turning a door knob, picking up my mug, releasing the handbrake in my car, unscrewing a jar lid, it goes on and on. So I’m putting a lot of effort onto eliminating that physical hazard to my health. At the moment I have glued a rubber “tire” on the control knob and I use a flat stick to roll the knob forward and back by pushing with the flat stick. I’m sure the stepper motors will be a more elegant solution.
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Here’s a report on my progress. The mechanical part of this project has been completed successfully but programming the stepper motor movements for the manual controls has eluded me. I took a deep dive into the arduino programming but never found the right information I needed to figure it out. I can’t keep spending time reading about this while I have work to do. So for the time being I have gone back to manually operating the milling table.
But maybe I should go CNC instead. Except for the one 60° back angle hole my trial CNC tests have been promising, although my manually operated milling table gives a much better finish in the wood. I also have a ramp area that I am simulating with a series of 1/2mm wide steps since I don’t have the software for a proper slope.
In general the type of stepper motor examples I found were science fair stuff. Program a stepper motor to rotate right one turn, rotate left 1/2 turn at a slower speed, then go back to the starting point. I don’t want any programmed movements. I want the stepper motors to follow my manual operation of the joystick or direction switches. It seems to me that manually operating stepper motors would be a much more useful demo project.
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There are many stepper motor driver boards out there which only take as control input a Step signal and a Direction signal. There is an Enable input you can control too but often it’s just pulled high to always enable the driver. So besides those 2-3 control signals there’s the power input which drives the motors.
Look for “Arduino A9488” for lots of data on doing that. From there, you’ll need to decide on what joystick you’ll be using and how to get those signals into the Arduino. There are many including bluetooth ones.
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I used arduino for stepper controls for a long time ( to drive both axes on a atlas618) this little driver is what I now use, cheap,easy to get,etc. Limit switches can be integrated. The only problem is a little soldering to bring out stop, reverse functions. A speed control knob on the face is easy to use and….. no programming required. And while the Arduino approach is more versatile, simplicity can be a virtue….joe
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I see variations on that for $20-$30. Nice!
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That looks more like I could figure it out. Thanks. I see I can get a pair for $37 on amazon.
I would need 2 for the 2 stepper motors. Are there any external connections for a joystick? One set of connections from each driver to one joystick.
This is as far as I got. I have 2 of the TMC2208 stepper motor drivers. If I could figure out the programming I would have it worked out.
Not a joystick, no.
But a google search for “joystick stepper motor controller” just turned these up:
There’s a review in the second, precision, one that might interest you:
I have a small manual milling machine that I decided to convert to become electrically driven and controlled. The grip in my hands was causing me some problems, and operating the hand wheels back and forth without discomfort was becoming less and less.
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This looks very cool if not more than twice as expensive. However, I don’t see why the two stepper motor drivers with one joystick would not work. I noted the comment about the milling table.
But it still bugs me that the programming for the arduino setup is not more accessible.
I have been successful at making Arduino projects in the past but I had a similar project to follow. I have not found any Arduino projects with manual control of stepper motors.
While watching the video that is linked to the Precision Joystick Stepper above the next video that came up was a motion controller for a studio camera and I as surprised how noisy it was. I would think that would eliminate any audio recording.
The older style of stepper drivers are quite noisy; that’s magnetoconstriction with chopped supply. The newer stepper drivers, particularly Trinamic drivers, smooth the supply to sharply reduce noise from magnetoconstriction.
End result: Ten years ago, 3d printers sang a loud song; today, you mostly hear whooosh as they move.
This looks great but after reading some more I decided the ZK-SMC02 is probably better choice for me.
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It shouldn’t be that hard to find code for manual control of steppers, with potentiometer or rotary encoder. I used a joystick to control an equatorial mount I made up and I like it, but, I would be Leary of a joystick in a lab where you might wanna pound an epo…… just sayin. I use the little ZK drivers with limit switch’s paralleled to manual push buttons and set the speed during the ‘feeds& speeds’ calculation…I like to have my hands free during an operation and the push buttons make the hand stress a non- issue….. best always…Joe
I’m using a milling table on my drill press the do small milling jobs. I make Native American style wooden flutes. Sometimes I inset a polished agate (flat on the back) into the top of a flute. These agates are not regular or symmetrical. But they are smooth and polished. It would be too boring to use something like an oval. Typically about 35mm long and 15mm wide. Basically I clamp the agate on top of the flute and mark the outline with an Xacto knife. Then on the milling table I mill out a recess inside the knife marked line. It’s always an irregular shape.
Just milling back and forth won’t do the job. In the middle perhaps. I end up with a bumpy outline. But eventually I have to smoothly follow the line around inside the shape. And definitely not cross the line!
I figured a joystick is the best way to do that since I need to be operating both axis at once, hopefully in a controllable way. Doing this with the hand knobs eventually goes bad when one knob turns the wrong way and cuts outside the line. Sigh
With a joystick I should be able to move the cutter in a smooth circle. I’m using a joystick from a radio controlled helicopter transmitter. Not a game controller joystick. They don’t have a good enough feel.
As long as the movements of both motors is the same rate it should be quite controllable. I would be moving quite slowly, gradually nibbling away inside the shape. If I stop moving the joystick the cutter stays right where it is. No going back “home”. The movement of the joystick should be the same as the way I want the cutter to move. Probably starting somewhere the middle.
There are other small things I make where moving straight back and forth exactly the same distance makes sense. For those things I typically cut the outside perimeter first and then plow out inside the lines. That gives me some leeway.
I use an Xbox controller on my cnc router when I go manual, maybe not as sensitive as your joystick, but, still pretty good. Following arcs, even at a very slow rate is…… challenging. That machine is belt driven, so, no backlash,you’ll have backlash on your screws to contend with,….So, good luck!…..best always…Joe