Hand Drill Leveling with an Accelerometer

If you enjoy making things, one of your most important tools is likely the hand drill. Perhaps taken for granted by modern-day craftsmen, consider how much slower jobs x, y, and z would be if you had to manufacture each and every hole with a hand-cranked apparatus.

There is, however, one big problem with hand drills: how do you know if your drill bit is perfectly level? If you think there should be a gadget for that, YouTuber GreatScott! shows off his accelerometer-based solution in the video below.

His gadget, which seems like something that should already exist, measures the angle of the drill with an ADXL345 accelerometer. For user feedback, it illuminates four LEDs based on the direction of “non-levelness.”

Since there’s little extra room for such a device in ‘Scott’s drill body, he instead mounted the electronics to the battery unit in a 3D-printed enclosure, compensating for the drill’s angle with offsets in the software. Even this enclosure is rather small, which meant using an ATtiny804 microcontroller for processing instead of an (already pretty small) Arduino Nano. The knock-on benefit here is that the processor can run off of a 3V coin-cell battery, further reducing the project’s size and complication.

Results are reportedly quite good, though it’s easier to use in the vertical than horizontal orientation because of where it is mounted. If you’d like to build something similar yourself, a parts list and more information is found in the video description. And yes, you could instead affix a small bubble level to your drill… or maybe even use a drill press, but what fun would that be?