[Noisebridge-discuss] That Goddamned Mill update: circuit board success!

[Ani Niow]

Some other updates...

I brought in a couple of blocks of brass and aluminium from the shop at CCSF
and tested them out with our mill. Here's the result:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vniow/4031500618/

The brass cut fantastically and was able to get it deeper than the
aluminium. Partially because I spent more time on it and partially because
the spindle speed for aluminium was too low and partially I didn't want to
go through the effort of adjusting the belt in order to remedy this.

I would also not try to cut too extensively in metals like these unless
using some kind of lubricant, I'll have to do some research on what's best
for what metals. The test pieces were designed in Illustrator, then imported
into Inkscape as SVG.

I basically brought these pieces in to hack on and test out the tolerances
of the mill and so far so good.


Some quirks...


The mill needs to have some more fine tuning, the slack is too high and the
tolerances not as tight as they could be. Going from Illustrator to Inkscape
seemed mostly okay though there were one or two quirks in the Gcode it
generated. Not completely closing lines and going slightly off near the part
where it had that odd separation are a couple of them, will be doing much
more experimenting.

Thanks to Mike for guiding me though how to actually use this and Crutcher
for fixing a weird resolution issue on the host PC.



-Ani




2009/10/18 Jonathan Foote <jtfoote at ieee.org>

> Yesterday I did some first experiments using the CNC mill to rout
> circuit boards from EagleCAD designs. After some ugly starts, I am
> happy to report success!
> I started with a fairly challenging test layout (an RS32 level
> converter from an SMD AVR Atmega 168 board I designed to work on one
> layer). The results can be seen next to the mill  -- the successful
> run will be obvious.
>
> Details on my procedure are on the wiki:
> https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/MaxNCMill#EagleCAD
>
> I think there's still room for improvement, but I'm stoked that the
> concept is proved!  When I get the process a little more solid, I will
> hold a workshop to share it. This will have to wait until I get back
> from China in November.  I also worked out some bugs in the
> Inkscape-SVG toolchain, so feel free to go wild with that.
>
> Thanks to Mike, Jonathan M., and all for help and encouragement.
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
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