Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Largest Milled PCB yet?
KL27x:
--- Quote ---Well done! However, this is pure masochism and throwing money out of the window, IMO. Photolithography + etching it would have been much faster and cheaper (never mind the dangerous dust!), then just use the CNC to drill the holes.
--- End quote ---
If you are gonna drill the holes with CNC, you should generally do that first, then apply the etch resist, so's you can line the resist to the holes. It's a lot more anxiety the other way round.
voltsandjolts:
Is it actually worth owning and running a PCB mill in these days of cheap proto PCBs?
According to pcbshopper.com, JLCPCB could make 10 of these double sided 200x300mm boards delivered to UK for GBP71 in 6 days.
With real vias. And solder mask. And silkscreen.
:-//
beanflying:
--- Quote from: voltsandjolts on January 05, 2019, 10:54:26 pm ---Is it actually worth owning and running a PCB mill in these days of cheap proto PCBs?
According to pcbshopper.com, JLCPCB could make 10 of these double sided 200x300mm boards delivered to UK for GBP71 in 6 days.
With real vias. And solder mask. And silkscreen.
:-//
--- End quote ---
It is a prototyping 'option' a more typical board would be under maybe an hour turnaround. Apart from the Vias needing more manual work, silkscreen and solder masks do little for a hand assembled prototype board. Make it and decide you need to add a few more bits or tweak a trace and do it again within an hour.
By then you have saved time (commercially this can be lots of $$) and got the project done so the designer and 'team' in some cases can move on when it works instead of maybe juggling several projects waiting for a board. When you have the design right then you can send it off to whoever you like.
Mine gets less use now for PCB's due to cheaper small commercial lot availability and my timeline isn't an issue for most jobs. It was getting more use in timber or plastics for my other toys prior to getting a LASER and a few 3D printers.
But they still have a place IMO.
james_s:
I don't etch boards at home very often, but it's still a useful ability to have. If I need a one-off prototype I can go from CAD to a finished ready to assemble PCB in under an hour including all the setup and cleanup, even expedited processing and shipping it's gonna be several days wait to send it out, and a lot more expensive.
Mechatrommer:
--- Quote from: JanTheVan on January 04, 2019, 07:13:53 pm ---Its not been without pain though, oh no! Wrong feed rates, bad quality cutters, snapping milling bits and the one that almost pushed me over the edge, and scrapped the 2nd attempt, WINDOW AUTOMATIC UPDATE! Yep, 3 hours in to the job, all looking good, windows decided to do an update and shut the PC down! That took a large glass of wine to get over.
--- End quote ---
pcb mill is a one time process, keep or trash... i've built a prototype before (its been 2 years now from the youtube date tag, its still under "alpha test" duh) to etch resist ink. the "mill" bit is just a pogo pin, anything wrong (usually missed steps) i can right away see and cancel process, board can still be reused all i have to do is add resist ink to the incorrect etched area and reprint, the same machine will also be used for drilling, just change bit, its a "Bethan" machine (BEtter THan hANd)...
the latest build is 10 x 20 cm PCB, it took 2-3 hours or so iirc due to some broken 3d printed part, i have to reprint 3-4 times (before realizing something broken) on the same board before getting the right result, if not because of that, i think 1 hour most is all it takes including copper ething and correcting (manual knife cutting) the shorted traces. for double sided, i use special method for alignment, no need overblown excess area (where the pcb side area will cut off and trashed). ymmv.
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