Automation and revamping of a lathe machine with Arduino control boards

Mechanical operations are performed by several machines depending on the type of product to be manufactured, both at industrial and laboratory levels. These machines can be both manual actuated or operate automatically and the lathe machine falls inside this category, which is used to work on revolutionary pieces. This thesis work concerns with the description and analysis of all the features implemented aiming to automate a lathe machine: starting from a manual instrument, the goal of the work is to modify it in order to obtain a low-cost automatic machine able to perform lathing operations in a didactic laboratory environment. The project can be subdivided into 3 main goals. Firstly, the implementation of an Arduino code useful to guide the movement of the working tool, through the command of suitable drivers, motors and mechanical elements able to convert the software program into mechanical actions. Four different types of processes have been implemented depending on the shape of the final product to obtain: with a human-machine interface, the user can choose the desired work cycle and set all the parameters needed. In the set of all the obtainable shapes, the processes developed regard the cylindrical and the conical turning. Furthermore, the more electrical part has been developed, concerning the design, simulation and practical realization of an electrical circuit able to drive the permanent magnet direct current motor useful to generate the rotational movement of the piece under work. Specifically, the electrical circuit built is a PWM network, which is able to control the voltage, and the current sent to the motor: the tuning of these physical quantities is aimed to obtain different rotational speeds, required by the user needs. To test the topology of the electrical circuit, a smaller one has been realized, handling a lower electrical power than the full power sustained by the motor itself. Other solutions are proposed to generate and handle a greater power for the motor. Finally, the link between the previous two parts have been faced: the implementation of the Arduino code useful to drive the DC motor and control its rotational speed and the final communication between the two Arduino boards in order to perform a desired working cycle. The last steps of the project have been the mechanical design with a 3D CAD software and realization of the additional components needed to complete the machine and the final working tests to check the correctness of the codes previously written. For a more complete test procedure, different working conditions have been implemented firstly at a code-level and then performed in the real world.