Protomat S103 - LPKF

[Andre]

Hi all,

We bought a Protomat S103 PCB milling from LPKF and we are still ramping up on this machine. We have had some successes at routing boards but we seem to be hitting snags with the software. At any moment it misaligns the head when changing tool and damages the tool holder. We've been through 4 tool holder so far.
We've had a good response from their help desk for the start up but as soon as we hit a problem they can't solve, they don't answer anymore.
Has anyone ever had this problem about bending the tool holder? Is this machine reliable? Are there success stories out there?
Your experience will be very appreciated. Thank you.

[Tuomas]

My university has an LPKF ProtoMat S63, we've had it for almost a year. Very simlar machine to yours, spindle is a bit slower and maybe some other small differences, but very similar. Here are some of my thoughts on the machine. I'm just a student who somehow manages to get involved with alot of stuff going on in the university, though, so keep that in mind.

We've had some major problems with it, more often than would be desired. We've had what I assume is the same problem happen aswell: when returning a bit to the holder, it misses and crashes the bit into the side of the holder, making a mess of the whole thing. We managed to bend the holder back into form each time it happened, though, and with some help from the local distributor, the problem was fixed and hasn't happened again. I don't recall what the fix was, though, sorry. Not even what was the root cause of that. I can ask another person who was involved with fixing the problem if he recalls it if I see him on skype over the weekend.

Other problems we've had include the spindle dropping the Universal Cutter bit from too high onto the adjustment slope, causing the bit tip to shatter with ~20% chance (that took a while to figure out that that was the problem); drills going too deep; drills not going deep enough; inconsistent universal cutter cutting width across the board and much more.

When the thing works, it is a very nice machine and really effortless to use, though. I've been a pretty active user of it and have milled numerous boards with it (for all kinds of random projects, most not related to studies or any work at all. very random). I gathered a pile of them just now, took a picture and attached it. With the Universal Cutter bit, 8mils accuracy is very much achievable and repeatable. I prefer to use 10-12mils traces just in case, though (we tend to overuse the bits, most of the stuff students here mill are pretty crude and accuracy isn't that important). with the microcutter bit, even better accuracy is probably achievable. It's a really convenient thing, I can walk up to the controller PC with a USB stick with gerbers on it, and in less than 10 minutes the Protomat is milling a board. I can do something else while waiting, flip the board halfway through the process, wait some more and a double sided board is done. Extremely convenient.

We get support from the local distributor and they have helped with the problems. Sometimes the fix has been just to lubricate something and sometimes to increase/decrease the value of some seemingly unrelated parameter in the service menu until the problem goes away. We would have never figured out the solutions to some problems without their help.

Now the machine has been working very nicely for a pretty long time and me and others are finally starting to trust the machine ("unfortunately" I'm also very close to finishing my degree, which means less time with the thing...).

[free_electron]

ahh. they should call thos emachines Crap-o-mats. I had a 95S in 2001. never made a single correct board with it.
Funny tidbit : At Devcon last week they proved once again their machines are crap. They had their latest model on the showfloor milling away a matrix of little boards ... and none of em were right ... just look at the copper slivers of the board bottom left. The others are in a deplorable state as well. You can clearly see the depth offsets... ful of area's that have not been milled right.

photo attached ...

[djsb]

These machines take a while to learn how to use properly. Like I said earlier in another post on this forum I have produced over 1000 pcb's on the Protomat S63 we have at work (a UK university) over the last year. I am the ONLY person that has used the machine for the last 12 months and once it's set up properly it can be trusted to make boards reliably.
We have had problems with a burnt out motor and the machine does get confused when picking up/replacing bits sometimes. It works best when given panellised jobs that allow it to work without interuption. Whilst it's doing it's stuff I can get on with other things. Students arent allowed to use the machine at the moment (on my recomendation) as it's to easily screwed up if not used properly. Like any machine they have their foibles but I like them.

[nctnico]

All the LPKF machines I've seen so far where gathering dust in a corner. When asked the owners said that it was hard to get a proper board done. Recently I spoke to someone who was actually enthousiastic about it. Perhaps he found the right settings by accident. Its rather tragic that they can't get a demonstration model to mill properly. It is a good idea but I guess its difficult to get it right. IMHO the biggest problem is that a piece of PCB material is never really flat.

The price is also not nice. How many PCBs can you have made professionally for the price of one LPKF?

[djsb]

12K for the machine. Over 3K per year min for the PCB production at Eurocircuits (for simple single sided boards no silkscreen). We have around 20 or so different designs that we plan to use throughout the school (for modular system design) eventually.
Plus I can produce a prototype design within 10 minutes as I've had plenty of practice. It's because it was stuck in a room for over 12 months that I was asked to make a go of it and I must say my work over the las t12 months has been a major success.
The machine has supported a 12 week class attended by over 80 students per class per week.
We have complete freedom to revise boards as we wish and completely debug them.
I think a lot of the resistance to using these machines is fear of the unknown and lack of training. It's basically a matter of getting sole access to a machine and really getting intimate with it. My next challeng is creating traing material for my workmates and helping them to learn the machine as well.

[jeroen74]

That thing existed long before cheap online PCB pooling services came around. Amazing that it's still such cumbersome product to use, apparently.

[free_electron]

I think a lot of the resistance to using these machines is fear of the unknown and lack of training. It's basically a matter of getting sole access to a machine and really getting intimate with it.

But that is the problem ! I don't want to get intimate with that fucker ! It has all kinds of super duper things like cameras, toolchangers, auto height sensing and what not. I expect to shove a plate of copperclad in there , drop a file and hit 'GO'. and some time later a board should come out. I don't want to have to check every 2 minutes if it hasnt run into its endstops, if the software hasn't crashed, if it hasn't broken a drill/millbit and gone one without grabbing another.

I can buy a used Excellon or Hitachi for half the price of an LPKF and i won't have to deal with any of that shit. I can throw a stack of board s in there. it'll pick the right bits , detect bit breakage and it's built like a tank on a half ton granite plate. it'll run without a hitch for 20 years. Its toolchanger can hold 500 bits. and it won;t be using crappy steppermotors but brushless 3 phase machines with optical feedback at a resolution way larger than LPKF can do. it will have a watercooled spindle going way faster than that little hobbybox''s glorified dremel. It'll find registration holes all by itself. and if it's of some age it'll be driven by an old PDP-11 which means they could do that stuff 50 years ago...

The LPKF machine is in the same state as all those 3d printers : hobby at best.
try to make a real board ( 4 mil track and gap , 10 mil drill , with full rubouts ) and you end up with a massively expensive board and a long waittime.  and yuo still won;t have thru hole plating , soldermask or silkscreen let aone ENIG or any other finish.. Count time ,consumables and re-starts and see wht it costs you. I can have a board made in 4 hours at the shop around the corner. A double sided board eurocard will cost me 200 bucks. who cares ?
if it must be cheap i'll do the same in china and pay 200 bucks and get 100 of those in 7 days.

These machines are cumbersome and have outlived their usefullness. They were stone-age and are still stone age. Watch that picture i posted. That's not even a high tech board... 0805 parts .. 6 mil gaps and it already fails during their 'demo'. If i were working for that company and had to demo it at an event like Designcon that pulls in 20000+ visitors and it performs like that i'd be hiding under the table ready to bolt for the door when nobody was looking.
it's trying to make 6 small boards ( they're like 5cm by 8 or so. ) it sits there for hours and you end up with .. nothing as they are full of copper slivers. look at that design. it's full of pinfilters and tuned antenna's . this is clearly a design that runs in the GHz band ... YOU DON'T STAND A CHANCE OF IT WORKING ! not with all the crap left behind post-milling. and the performance from board to board will be deplorable as well as repeatibility is also zilch.

That picture speaks a thousand words. And they all say the same : it don't work quite right... I took that picture last week at design con and they kind of threw me nasty looks for taking it..guess they didn;t want it out there.

[jeroen74]

try to make a real board ( 4 mil track and gap , 10 mil drill , with full rubouts )

What are full rubouts?  Removal of all copper so you get true correspondence to the Gerber?

I always had thought the LPFK was more or less one-of-a-kind, but there are other machines capable of doing that?

[free_electron]

Correct. If i make a board it needs to be EXACTLY like the etched one. imagine you are doing an RF design ? or even a high speed design or something else. Can't have crosstalk of or performance problems because of all the floating copper islands.

There are other machines out there T-Tech for example. or Colinbus. http://t-techtools.com/store/


build your own : http://web.mit.edu/imoyer/www/portfolio/pcbmill/index.html

[nctnico]

And there are CNC mills. Some people on this forum use a CNC mill which costs around $2000 to mill their PCBs. About the demo board: IMHO it is a fantasy board. I really doubt it will work because everything is way to close. I assume LPKF mainly targets RF designers because they usually like to test their designs after simulation quickly. Still, simulation tools get better all the time so testing is just a formality.

[westfw]

I have an LPKF 92S, and I've produced some boards that I'm happy with, using it.  It doesn't have a tool holder, so I haven't had that particular problem.
I attached an example; it's quite nice to have when you want something oddly shaped, large, and with internal cutouts and such that doesn't fit into the "cheap prototype" limitations.

I don't think I'd get another one, with the modern prototyping services existing.  It won't do modern SMT devices (at least, not without godawful-expensive consumable tools), doesn't provide PTH or soldermasks, isn't all that easy to use.  You might THINK that you can get a PCB faster than that 2W turnaround from XXX,  but it's relatively non-trivial.  And it's expensive.  Even beyond the cost of the machine, the consumables (mostly those fancy routing bits) will end up costing you as much a cheap prototypes, for any reasonable amount of use.

[nctnico]

IMHO the cheap prototyping services will be happy to make such a board. A neat trick is to order panels if the PCB design is small. With most PCB pooling services a small PCB costs as much as a larger PCB because there are always initial setup costs. I usually pay around € 120 for a prototype PCB which gets made in 5 working days (dual layer, solder mask, white screen). Because I order a panel I get somewhere between 8 to 32 PCBs for that money depending on the size of the design.

[djsb]

I can buy a used Excellon or Hitachi for half the price of an LPKF and i won't have to deal with any of that shit. I can throw a stack of board s in there. it'll pick the right bits , detect bit breakage and it's built like a tank on a half ton granite plate. it'll run without a hitch for 20 years. Its toolchanger can hold 500 bits. and it won;t be using crappy steppermotors but brushless 3 phase machines with optical feedback at a resolution way larger than LPKF can do. it will have a watercooled spindle going way faster than that little hobbybox''s glorified dremel. It'll find registration holes all by itself. and if it's of some age it'll be driven by an old PDP-11 which means they could do that stuff 50 years ago...

If you can recommend a machine that does the job better than the LPKF and for cheaper initial AND running costs I will be more than willing to look into it. I'm all for an easier life.

David.

[trevwhite]

I have an LPKF C60 machine. I must admit there is a learning curve and some boards are a pain. But when doing quick development it does work well. Here is a board I did the other day. Single sided boards are straight forward to mill. Double sided do tend to be more tricky as the alignment can be difficult when flipping the board over.

The last board I did is attached. I did it quickly and tested the circuit. I have to make changes so I have not lost a week waiting for the board to come back. My machine has manual tool change and I prefer that as I can keep an eye on the machine.

[free_electron]

- Single sided boards are straight forward to mill.
- Double sided do tend to be more tricky as the alignment can be difficult when flipping the board
- I did it quickly and tested the circuit.
- I have to make changes so I have not lost a week waiting for the board to come back.
- My machine has manual tool change and I prefer that as I can keep an eye on the machine.

Let's take a serious look at this example ( i will try not to rant and rave... Promise ) ohhh, this is going to be a long one...

1) Single sided boards are indeed 'easy'. Pop in a plate of copperclad and away we go. Setup time is a few minutes. I remember that from my 95S. Drill two registration holes, put the pins in , load the file, let it generate the milling pattern , set home and off we go. Fine

Problems:
- You need to use their board material ( at least with the 95S ) as it has thin copper ( half ounce). They jacked up the prices.
- you need sacrifical material as well , or you drill in the bed of the machine....
- the plates are made for the bed of the machine. Drilling the regholes means you only could use about 3/4 of the available surface to avoid the head running into the registration pins. Everytime you mill a board you have scrap material.

Your particular board has what . 8 mil track and gap ? I can etch that with a spunge in 3 minutes. Faster than the lpkf can mill it. But, granted, no chemicals. The cost of the milling bits though ...

Now, in order to do this particular board : how much extra time did you spend to tweak the layout so it could be made single sided? How much concessions did you have to do in terms of design rules? That also costs money. Answering 'it's a quick proto , the real board will be doublesided' fails you. The goal of a quickturn is to have the real deal fast. If you need to rework it for production you are burning again time and money doing another layout and introducing additional variables in the system. The quickturn needs to be identical to the production.

2) double sided tends to be more tricky. Nah, once you got the registration holes drilled the machine software does the rest. But... Doublesided is one step. Metallisation is the problem. Sure you could tweak the layout so you can use stubs of wire or the component pins if thru-hole, but you still could not place vias under a component. And you fall back to the problem that your proto is not identical to your production. Duplication of work , introducing variables, time, money, yaddayadda... And you have to solder all those bridges which costs again time and money... You can buy their plating system (multicontac II) which i also had. Oh boy now we are golden... Ehhh here is how that stuff works:

-now you need their board material. No escaping. They give you a special substrate , doublesided but each side has two layers of copper. The top layer peels off and acts as a protecting surface for the mill so it doesnt scuff up the layer beneath when drilling and so it wont corrode. You drill regholes , drill all the holes first , and go through the plating process. They use basically the black hole process with a twist. You first go through two nasty chemicals that etch the fiberglass material in the holes. Here is problem 1: there is no agitation. So on small holes air bubbles can get trapped meaning the copper wont stick very well later.... After a quick wash ( darn it now i need running water and a drain and a permit to dump that washwater down the drain....) you get into the black ink. Again no agitation....  That ink has a limited lifespan... And is expensive. You need new chemicals every 6 months, used or not... And getting rid of the old ones is a hassle too. You are not a pcb house that knows what to do. Oh ,but here is -tatadadaaaa- lpkf to the rescue. You can ship it back to us. We send you two big drums , pour everything in there and ship it back. Of course the drums cost you but it makes life easier. You do need a chemical transport though... Good luck finding one. I spent three weeks on the phone with various companies.( this is hazmat)
-what's in it?
-Ehh, dunno. It's from lpkf. Plating solution and some other stuff.
-We need description and chemical names sir for the paperwork.
-Ehh lpkf process is 'secret' they don't release the names of the chemicals.

Eventually the transport company got in touch eith lpkf and it was all sorted out. But still three weeks.... Time, money .. All that stuff you know...

Where was i ? Ah yes. So we now have black ink. Time to dry the board and peel off the extra copper foils so we have clean , unscuffed copper and holes with dry ink in em. Time to pull out the pocket microscope and inspect each and ever hole.. Dont want any air bubbles in there.. Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking.. into the future....
Plating time ! Woohoo. This has agitation. Oh but wait... How much current do i need ? How long ? Do i need to add a bit of glycol to the plating solution ? What all that muck floating at the surface ? Is my solution well balanced? I dunno , let's wing it and see what happens.... Fast forward an hour or so ( as their plater is grossly underpowered )

Pull it out wash and dry ( permits....for the wastewater). Now, they don't use pulseplating so you do have problems with phosphorisation( or is it sulphurisation.. Can't remember. The deposited copper is of lesser quality than the real copper and it has trapped one of the chemicals elements from  the plating solution. H2s04.. Ah yes sulphurisation it is. That is what pulse plating is about. It strips the sulphur deposit by temporarily reversing current. ( many times a second )

Anyway. We now hopefully ha a board where there is copper in each and every hole .. If there were no air bubbles, if there was ink in every hole... If if if..

Milling time. Time keeps on ticking ..... Flip the board ... Time keeps on ticking ... Oh no , it broke a milling bit ! Oh no the software crashed ? Oh no it crashed and milled a line to nowhere cutting through half the traces ... Redo from start.. And you have to use a complete new panel because you need the double foil....

In practice: to do this you spend a whole day drilling , washing, inking, drying, inspecting, plating, washing, milling in the hope to have a board. 8 hours.... The shop around the corner, which is a real board shop, can do it in 4... With soldermask silkscreen and flying probe test... Oh wait ! What? Test !!! Darn it, i knew i forgot something. Assuming everything went right and the machine did not mess up , we still need to test our vias! surely we are not going to assemble a board with vias under components without testing it ! So grab your favorite ohmmeter, magnifier and prepare to burn the midnight oil testing each and every via.... Timekeeps on ticking...

Oh boy.. And i'm only at point 2.. Time for point 3

3) i did it quickly and tested the circuit. No you didn't, you spent half a day trying to make a singlesided layout , another half a day futzing around with a machine and assembling a board that was nowhere near the real deal. If you find a mistake you are going to burn another day futzing more with that machine. You self admitted you don't like the toolchanger because then you can keep an eye on the machine. These machines are very addictive. Just like the 3d printers . You assume to shove something in there and let it do its thing while you go off and be productive at something else.. Not! You sit there watching the darn thing. Meanwhile the dollars fly out the window.... And the boss pays ( or if you are a one man shop... You pay.. Through the nose)

Now, your board has what, 20 parts on it ? You could have grabbed a little demoboard from the cpumaker for 20$ , spiderwebbed some thru hole stuff on it and tested your design equally well. The time it costs you to solder the parts on that pcb is equal to the time soldering the spiderweb. You saved the time on the machine and the time doing the special singlesided layout. So i just shorted all that time and money. If it is a one off : build it on perfboard.

4) a week ? Any pcb shop out there offer 8 hour or next day turnaround. Live in a high-tech area and you can get 4 hour. 8 hours doing it yourself or 8 hours where someone else does it while you do something else. You surely are not sitting around waiting for the board are you ? There is other productive things to do meanwhile. And in raw cost ... I'm betting the pcb shop will be cheaper, even on an 8 hour turn. Plus: real board with soldermask, silkscreen , full electrical test and surface finish to your liking (hasl, enig, enepig, osp, tinflash, silverflash : you pick)

If this is for schools: many a boardhouse will strike deals for cheap boards. Students don't waste a day milling their board and they don't need it then and there either, as the day will be over and tomorrow they have a different subject to study. Labtime comes along again next week. So you have 7 days of fabtime (most boardshops run 7 days a week so the chemistry doesn't go off)
Plus no clumsy student fingers drilling in their hands, breaking bits, messing up settings, or otherwise vandalizizing the machine and holding everyone up. Yay! We have a win-win situation.

-i can keep an eye on it. If my boss catches me wasting time staring at that machine he'd first fling it trough the window and then me through the door.

Now draw your conclusion....

Mine says : It may work for that 1% of the boards out there.. The rest ? It takes more time and costs more money and it ain't worth the hassle.

[nctnico]

The above is a bit over the top but also holds quite a bit of truth.

When I develop circuits I sometimes test part of a circuit on a self etched board which in most cases is double sided where I keep one side as a solid ground plane. You don't really need an exact PCB to see if a circuit works. If a circuit is that sensitive to changes in a PCB design then the design is crap to start with. An exception may be RF stuff where the widths of a trace need to be precise down to 0.01mm or less. A 0.01mm variation of a 0.2mm trace is an error of 5%.

I totally agree on the plating. For a long time this has been the holy grail for self etched boards. Nowadays its just better to order a board. Its just a matter of planning. When I work on a project I make the PCB first, order it and start working on the firmware, test rig or the manual. No time lost due to proper planning.

[djsb]

Production quality boards are not needed where I work and planning of any kind is a foreign concept . If I could find a board house that did a 24 hour (or less) service for cheap single sided (or double) boards in the SE of England I might use them instead. Multilayer,plated through hole and silk screen printing is not needed.
We are trying to move away from etching the boards chemically inhouse and for this the LPKF is a vast improvement on the horrible chemical process (having to etch upto 100 boards in a week).
The students also make mistakes and redo their boards SEVERAL times and I don't think there is a board house that is responsive enough to this kind of demand. I can produce a PCB in 10 minutes from submission of the gerbers by email.
We are also setting up a system checking the files submitted and imposing 5 different fixed board sizes so that designs can be pannelised efficiently onto a fixed LPKF pcb panel size (9 x 12). We are trying out FAB3000 for this purpose.

[free_electron]

When I develop circuits I sometimes test part of a circuit on a self etched board which in most cases is double sided where I keep one side as a solid ground plane.

bingo. print on foil , expose uv , develop ,etch using Fecl and spunge tecnique: half an hour for a board from printout to board.

You don't really need an exact PCB to see if a circuit works.

Try making an active filter , anything that needs guarding, or anything running above 10MHz... you are dead in the water. try doing anything sensitive liek for example the input stage of an ADSL modem  (which was what i was doing with my LPKF. it's about 30 passive components , no big deal , but the problem is that there are inductors in there that couple to each other.. and we're after really good common mode rejection... with the cheapest parts we can find (this is for mass production and under controlof the penny-pinchers. Designgin something that works is one thing. designing it to work well and be cheap... another whole can of worms.). Trying to ride the edge ... so yes the design is VERY sensitive to the pcb layout. Besides the real project will run on a 4 layer where i will have a plane and it will be impedance controlled. Good luck with the doublesided bodge ... and it ain't RF ... 2.1 MHz max..

I know of someone that tried to make a single turn coil on a pcb. so it's just a 340 degree arc with two stubs sticking out. radius about 10 cm , track width about 1cm. milling two boards with the same mill this 0.1% variation was so bad ( aging of the mill ) that the results were not reproducable ( this coil was for an MRI machine ). So even a stupid board like that didn't work right.

LPKF shows always those boards with the strip lines , pin filters and other RF kerjiggery on it ( that design is a dud but it looks 'rf-ey' to attract ). I know from a reputable Prof at a reputable university that that shit doesn't work. Once you deal with those kind of frequencies even the slanted edge of the copper has an impact. Since your precision mill is 45 degrees your trace runs off from top to bottom ) across the thickness of the copper under 45 degree angles. Etch the same board and that angle is 70 to 75 degrees... biiiig difference for RF circuitry !

When I work on a project I make the PCB first, order it and start working on the firmware, test rig or the manual. No time lost due to proper planning.

bingo ! that is the way it's done.

- Monday/Tuesday : build a couple of sections 'spiderweb' to gain some confidence in the bit's you've never done before.
- Wednesday / Thursday : layout board
- Friday : send gerber to fab and order parts
- weekend YAY ! bring out the barbeque
- Monday before noon : prepare assembly drawings for the 'soldering lady'. At noon the board and parts are in. Soldering lady can go off and do her thing. by tuesday morning i'm measuring...

[mikeselectricstuff]

Production quality boards are not needed where I work and planning of any kind is a foreign concept . If I could find a board house that did a 24 hour (or less) service for cheap single sided (or double) boards in the SE of England I might use them instead.

Screenbond will do 24h single and PTH boards- minimum cost is around £150 for 24h. Gets more reasomable if you can wait 3-5 days

[free_electron]

house that did a 24 hour (or less) service for cheap single sided (or double) boards in the SE of England I might use them instead.

Come on. England is full of board houses. Call them. Charter a panel. You are tackling this the wrong way. you treat the boards as indivdual projects. of course it will be expensive.

Call the boardhouses and explain them that you want to charter a panel ( pcb fabs use 18x12 or 18x24 inch panels  or some other size where they basically have a short and along panel without changing width as their machinery is setup for flow-through) ask them what is the cost for a single PANEL ( small panel and alarge Panel ) tell them you are going to use the lowest class ( for example 10 or 12 mil track and gap and nothing smaller than a 0.2mm drill. ) you don't need soldermask or silkscreens and all they need to do is drill and route.

Gett yourself a simple gerber editor like cam350. predefine the board panel including the keepout areas for tooling in the gerber editor. this is your 'charter template'.

now, in the pcb desing tool you can set up templates for a number of 'common sizes' on a mechanical layer ( or a contour layer) you define the edges of the board but you leave the last 2 millimeter open. so essentially you carve the 4 edges of the boards but the corners have 2mm where there is no carving. this is your retainer.
set that up as templates. the students can do their desing work and spit out gerber and ncdrill. import each project in the gerber editor and place them. send combined gerber to the pcb house. There is NO manual intervention needed. The whole design is treated as a single panel. the milling information is there. they will send you the finished panel. each board will be held at the corners by 2mm of material . simply grab a pair of cutters and cut the corners to get the individual boards out.

A charter panel like that should cost around 200$. you can easily put 20 or so individual projects on a panel. that 10$ a board.

I can produce a PCB in 10 minutes from submission of the gerbers by email.

unless these lpkf machines have improved tremendously above the 95S i don't believe that. the software alone needs 10minutes to create the toolpath... you need to set up the mills ( pressing the rings on ) doin a test-run to see how wide the slit really is , feed all that stuff into the software... that alone takes half an hour.

here ya go : this is the principle

[nctnico]

Besides the real project will run on a 4 layer where i will have a plane and it will be impedance controlled. Good luck with the doublesided bodge ... and it ain't RF ... 2.1 MHz max..

Actually I'm using my self made double sided boards up to several GHz... It just needs some vias in the right place.

[nctnico]

The students also make mistakes and redo their boards SEVERAL times and I don't think there is a board house that is responsive enough to this kind of demand. I can produce a PCB in 10 minutes from submission of the gerbers by email.

Having to wait when an error is made in a PCB is a good incentive to get a board (mostly) right the first time. Its simple as that. Otherwise your students will be in for a very cold shower when they get their first job and learn that it may take several weeks before they can get a first prototype and their boss won't be happy when it has numerous errors. In some cases I even had to wait about 10 months to get the first prototype of a board. Nothing special; just an assembly house messing things up and a shortage of components.

[LPKF_USA]

Hi all,

We bought a Protomat S103 PCB milling from LPKF and we are still ramping up on this machine. We have had some successes at routing boards but we seem to be hitting snags with the software. At any moment it misaligns the head when changing tool and damages the tool holder. We've been through 4 tool holder so far.
We've had a good response from their help desk for the start up but as soon as we hit a problem they can't solve, they don't answer anymore.
Has anyone ever had this problem about bending the tool holder? Is this machine reliable? Are there success stories out there?
Your experience will be very appreciated. Thank you.

Hi Andre,

We are very sorry to hear about your troubles with the tool holder. Which country are you from? I ask because we have different centers for support around the globe. If you are from the United States, you can either contact support@lpkfusa.com or call support: 503-454-4229. We are open M-F, 8-5 Pacific Time. I've spoken with our support manager, who mentioned we can do a remote session to get to the center of your issue and make sure everything is worked out.

If you are from outside the US, contact rp.support@lpkf.com. Which service center assists you will depend on which country you are in. If you let me know, I can get you the contact info for the service center in your geographic location. We are always working to ensure our machines are operating at peak condition and we look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks everyone else on this post for the kind words! It is really cool to see some of the projects you are completing with your ProtoMats. Feel free to submit a pic to our Twitter account @LPKF_USA and I'll make sure to give you a mention.

I hope this helps for now, Andre!

- Shane

[LPKF_USA]

I have an LPKF C60 machine. I must admit there is a learning curve and some boards are a pain. But when doing quick development it does work well. Here is a board I did the other day. Single sided boards are straight forward to mill. Double sided do tend to be more tricky as the alignment can be difficult when flipping the board over.

The last board I did is attached. I did it quickly and tested the circuit. I have to make changes so I have not lost a week waiting for the board to come back. My machine has manual tool change and I prefer that as I can keep an eye on the machine.

Hey Trevwhite,

Great board!

I wanted to let you know we are having a contest where you could win a Raspberry Pi kit by tweeting us an application you made on your LPKF machine... www.lpkfusa.com/myPCB/ for more info!

Shane

[LPKF_USA]

My university has an LPKF ProtoMat S63, we've had it for almost a year. Very simlar machine to yours, spindle is a bit slower and maybe some other small differences, but very similar. Here are some of my thoughts on the machine. I'm just a student who somehow manages to get involved with alot of stuff going on in the university, though, so keep that in mind.

We've had some major problems with it, more often than would be desired. We've had what I assume is the same problem happen aswell: when returning a bit to the holder, it misses and crashes the bit into the side of the holder, making a mess of the whole thing. We managed to bend the holder back into form each time it happened, though, and with some help from the local distributor, the problem was fixed and hasn't happened again. I don't recall what the fix was, though, sorry. Not even what was the root cause of that. I can ask another person who was involved with fixing the problem if he recalls it if I see him on skype over the weekend.

Other problems we've had include the spindle dropping the Universal Cutter bit from too high onto the adjustment slope, causing the bit tip to shatter with ~20% chance (that took a while to figure out that that was the problem); drills going too deep; drills not going deep enough; inconsistent universal cutter cutting width across the board and much more.

When the thing works, it is a very nice machine and really effortless to use, though. I've been a pretty active user of it and have milled numerous boards with it (for all kinds of random projects, most not related to studies or any work at all. very random). I gathered a pile of them just now, took a picture and attached it. With the Universal Cutter bit, 8mils accuracy is very much achievable and repeatable. I prefer to use 10-12mils traces just in case, though (we tend to overuse the bits, most of the stuff students here mill are pretty crude and accuracy isn't that important). with the microcutter bit, even better accuracy is probably achievable. It's a really convenient thing, I can walk up to the controller PC with a USB stick with gerbers on it, and in less than 10 minutes the Protomat is milling a board. I can do something else while waiting, flip the board halfway through the process, wait some more and a double sided board is done. Extremely convenient.

We get support from the local distributor and they have helped with the problems. Sometimes the fix has been just to lubricate something and sometimes to increase/decrease the value of some seemingly unrelated parameter in the service menu until the problem goes away. We would have never figured out the solutions to some problems without their help.

Now the machine has been working very nicely for a pretty long time and me and others are finally starting to trust the machine ("unfortunately" I'm also very close to finishing my degree, which means less time with the thing...).

Hi Tuomas,

Those are some great applications! I wanted to let you know we are having a contest where you could win a Raspberry Pi by sharing an application on Twitter. www.lpkfusa.com/myPCB/ for more info

Shane

[chulomex3]

- Single sided boards are straight forward to mill.
- Double sided do tend to be more tricky as the alignment can be difficult when flipping the board
- I did it quickly and tested the circuit.
- I have to make changes so I have not lost a week waiting for the board to come back.
- My machine has manual tool change and I prefer that as I can keep an eye on the machine.

Let's take a serious look at this example ( i will try not to rant and rave... Promise ) ohhh, this is going to be a long one...

1) Single sided boards are indeed 'easy'. Pop in a plate of copperclad and away we go. Setup time is a few minutes. I remember that from my 95S. Drill two registration holes, put the pins in , load the file, let it generate the milling pattern , set home and off we go. Fine

Problems:
- You need to use their board material ( at least with the 95S ) as it has thin copper ( half ounce). They jacked up the prices.
- you need sacrifical material as well , or you drill in the bed of the machine....
- the plates are made for the bed of the machine. Drilling the regholes means you only could use about 3/4 of the available surface to avoid the head running into the registration pins. Everytime you mill a board you have scrap material.

1.  I buy my material direct from Rogers or whoever sells it.
2.  The bed has a replaceable air permeable board material that lasts a long time (about 9 months depending on use).
3.  Machine uses fiducial recognition so no pins needed.

Now, in order to do this particular board : how much extra time did you spend to tweak the layout so it could be made single sided? How much concessions did you have to do in terms of design rules? That also costs money. Answering 'it's a quick proto , the real board will be doublesided' fails you. The goal of a quickturn is to have the real deal fast. If you need to rework it for production you are burning again time and money doing another layout and introducing additional variables in the system. The quickturn needs to be identical to the production.

With camera and fiducial recognition.  Double sided boards are a piece of cake.  No need to limit to single sided boards.

2) double sided tends to be more tricky. Nah, once you got the registration holes drilled the machine software does the rest. But... Doublesided is one step. Metallisation is the problem. Sure you could tweak the layout so you can use stubs of wire or the component pins if thru-hole, but you still could not place vias under a component. And you fall back to the problem that your proto is not identical to your production. Duplication of work , introducing variables, time, money, yaddayadda... And you have to solder all those bridges which costs again time and money... You can buy their plating system (multicontac II) which i also had. Oh boy now we are golden... Ehhh here is how that stuff works:

Prototype and Production are almost never the same.  By the time we're into layout of real production boards we've changed many attributes because of the prototyping.

-

now you need their board material. No escaping. They give you a special substrate , doublesided but each side has two layers of copper. The top layer peels off and acts as a protecting surface for the mill so it doesnt scuff up the layer beneath when drilling and so it wont corrode. You drill regholes , drill all the holes first , and go through the plating process. They use basically the black hole process with a twist. You first go through two nasty chemicals that etch the fiberglass material in the holes. Here is problem 1: there is no agitation. So on small holes air bubbles can get trapped meaning the copper wont stick very well later.... After a quick wash ( darn it now i need running water and a drain and a permit to dump that washwater down the drain....) you get into the black ink. Again no agitation....  That ink has a limited lifespan... And is expensive. You need new chemicals every 6 months, used or not... And getting rid of the old ones is a hassle too. You are not a pcb house that knows what to do. Oh ,but here is -tatadadaaaa- lpkf to the rescue. You can ship it back to us. We send you two big drums , pour everything in there and ship it back. Of course the drums cost you but it makes life easier. You do need a chemical transport though... Good luck finding one. I spent three weeks on the phone with various companies.( this is hazmat)
-what's in it?
-Ehh, dunno. It's from lpkf. Plating solution and some other stuff.
-We need description and chemical names sir for the paperwork.
-Ehh lpkf process is 'secret' they don't release the names of the chemicals.

I use whatever material I find in the lab.  Some stuff around 25 years old and have had no issues.  Again, I also buy direct from Rogers.  I will buy from LPKF for regular copper clad. 1 ounce and .5 ounce.

Where was i ? Ah yes. So we now have black ink. Time to dry the board and peel off the extra copper foils so we have clean , unscuffed copper and holes with dry ink in em. Time to pull out the pocket microscope and inspect each and ever hole.. Dont want any air bubbles in there.. Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking.. into the future....
Plating time ! Woohoo. This has agitation. Oh but wait... How much current do i need ? How long ? Do i need to add a bit of glycol to the plating solution ? What all that muck floating at the surface ? Is my solution well balanced? I dunno , let's wing it and see what happens.... Fast forward an hour or so ( as their plater is grossly underpowered )

Pull it out wash and dry ( permits....for the wastewater). Now, they don't use pulseplating so you do have problems with phosphorisation( or is it sulphurisation.. Can't remember. The deposited copper is of lesser quality than the real copper and it has trapped one of the chemicals elements from  the plating solution. H2s04.. Ah yes sulphurisation it is. That is what pulse plating is about. It strips the sulphur deposit by temporarily reversing current. ( many times a second )

Anyway. We now hopefully ha a board where there is copper in each and every hole .. If there were no air bubbles, if there was ink in every hole... If if if..

Via plating takes about 30min for me since it has to bake in the oven to cure.  I basically squeegee conductive epoxy over the exposed holes (everything else is covered by sticky tape.  Nice and easy)

Milling time. Time keeps on ticking ..... Flip the board ... Time keeps on ticking ... Oh no , it broke a milling bit ! Oh no the software crashed ? Oh no it crashed and milled a line to nowhere cutting through half the traces ... Redo from start.. And you have to use a complete new panel because you need the double foil....

Milling time is usually 10 min to 1 hour for large panels.  Although you are correct on the software crash/bits etc.  Yes it does happen.

In practice: to do this you spend a whole day drilling , washing, inking, drying, inspecting, plating, washing, milling in the hope to have a board. 8 hours.... The shop around the corner, which is a real board shop, can do it in 4... With soldermask silkscreen and flying probe test... Oh wait ! What? Test !!! Darn it, i knew i forgot something. Assuming everything went right and the machine did not mess up , we still need to test our vias! surely we are not going to assemble a board with vias under components without testing it ! So grab your favorite ohmmeter, magnifier and prepare to burn the midnight oil testing each and every via.... Timekeeps on ticking...

The nice thing I end up doing is perfecting my design so when I send it out to the proto-fab house I end up with a close to production prototype board that has all the silk screen/solder mask etc.  Then I continue refining. 

3) i did it quickly and tested the circuit. No you didn't, you spent half a day trying to make a singlesided layout , another half a day futzing around with a machine and assembling a board that was nowhere near the real deal. If you find a mistake you are going to burn another day futzing more with that machine. You self admitted you don't like the toolchanger because then you can keep an eye on the machine. These machines are very addictive. Just like the 3d printers . You assume to shove something in there and let it do its thing while you go off and be productive at something else.. Not! You sit there watching the darn thing. Meanwhile the dollars fly out the window.... And the boss pays ( or if you are a one man shop... You pay.. Through the nose)

I had a 15GHz filter built and tested on the Network Analyzer within 45min of starting the board so it was pretty quick.  (granted nothing went wrong with software/bits etc)

Now, your board has what, 20 parts on it ? You could have grabbed a little demoboard from the cpumaker for 20$ , spiderwebbed some thru hole stuff on it and tested your design equally well. The time it costs you to solder the parts on that pcb is equal to the time soldering the spiderweb. You saved the time on the machine and the time doing the special singlesided layout. So i just shorted all that time and money. If it is a one off : build it on perfboard.

Again, once I got my design down on the s103, I sent it out to the proto-house to get a nicer version.

4) a week ? Any pcb shop out there offer 8 hour or next day turnaround. Live in a high-tech area and you can get 4 hour. 8 hours doing it yourself or 8 hours where someone else does it while you do something else. You surely are not sitting around waiting for the board are you ? There is other productive things to do meanwhile. And in raw cost ... I'm betting the pcb shop will be cheaper, even on an 8 hour turn. Plus: real board with soldermask, silkscreen , full electrical test and surface finish to your liking (hasl, enig, enepig, osp, tinflash, silverflash : you pick)

Making mistakes on my prototype in house boards was great being that I had high confidence that my nicer version of board house boards were going to come in with most errors ironed out.

-i can keep an eye on it. If my boss catches me wasting time staring at that machine he'd first fling it trough the window and then me through the door.

Sounds like your boss needs to work on his management skills.

[chulomex3]

PS  I'm with Free Electron on a lot of points he brought up.  This machine is far from perfect but there were some details that are no longer an issue that I felt compelled to dispel.

[Sabesto]

Just for future reference for others having problems with this machine and finding this thread, I’m posting a few problems and solutions that I’ve encountered with the S103:

System: S103 with automatic tool change and vacuum table

- Drill bits breaking often / wearing down fast:
Clean and lubricate the chuck. We found out that if this is not done regularly it will shoot the bits out of the chuck when calibrating the tool height (which it does whenever changing tool). When hitting the sloped calibration surface it will shatter the tip on the bit, this cost us a lot of them.

- Material moving:
We tape down the material as much as possible, at least on the last layer before it routes out the board. The vacuum table is often not good enough to hold the material when routing out / removing large areas of copper. Also, if you choose to rub out large areas, keep in mind that the head slides along the surface. If the whole head moves over a rubbed out area it can snag when hitting a copper edge, ripping it off the track or moving the material.

- Bits touching the surface where it should not:
The replaceable vacuum boards vary *a lot* in thickness, this is not a huge problem as the head rides on the surface. However, it seems like the play in height difference the head can tolerate is less then the difference in thickness of the vacuum boards. We measure all 4 corners when replacing a vacuum board, take the average and adjust the "vacuum table height" setting. it is unclear how this should be measured as the manual does not mention it, but it seems to be from the aluminium surface the vacuum table is mounted on to the top of the replaceable material.

- Layers out of alignment when using camera to read fiducials:
Not figured this one out yet, even when calibrating the camera head offset every time the machine is booted up its still misaligned.

All in all its a good tool to have, but I would not recommend anyone to buy this with the intention of letting many different people use it. With all the hiccups and bugs it should be operated by one user only.

If anyone from LPKF reads this, I have a lot of tips regarding improvements to the system (just listing a few, please PM me if you are interested in speaking to me) I have spent so much time on this machine, I don’t want to spend more time rewriting this and sending it to LPKF:

- If you haven’t already, the manual requires a lot of work, this would also save you a lot of phone calls.

- Add an emergency stop button to the software!

- When you flip the board and the machine tries to find the fiducials, which it never manages to do automatically unless you lucked out and flipped it perfectly, let the user select if he wants to direct the head manually before having to wait for it to fail the automatic recognition which takes time.

- When calibrating milling width with the camera, let the user manually measure the width. Why? read the next problem

- You should have a picture from the camera with optimal settings as an example to go by when adjusting the image settings. When measuring milling width the machine more then often finds the wrong edges. What looks good for a human does not work at all for the recognition software it seems.

- When routing out boards, the contour router sticks out the exact same depth every time, causing it to be worn out just in that point. This should be fixed so that you could either manually or automatically vary this depth.

- In the "Board production wizard" why does the machine not switch to camera reference when setting up the material area? I still forget to change to camera as reference and not drill before I start the wizard (or at least let the user change this while the wizard is up).

- Let the user pause the machine when using the wizard as it really should be supervised at all times when milling.

- Explain how to remove the dummy bit that is in the chuck when the machine is delivered, the program says no bits are mounted, we where afraid that it would try to pick up a new tool with the dummy bit already in the chuck. Also, add an option to manually release the chuck.

- In general, the machine does a lot of things automatically, like releasing the dummy bit on first tool change, many things like this is not specified in the manual, and because of all the hiccups and bugs I would like more manual control in general. An option to reduce contour routing speed for instance would be nice as it could reduce the risk of moving the material.

- Tell me how on earth the solder paste dispenser is suppose to work (granted, the last time I tried this was one year ago, maybe the software has been fixed). Machine said 0,X mm nozzle was mounted while we only had the 0,Y mm nozzle, I found no way to change this

[Scribe]

Hi guys,

We're looking at purchasing the Protomat S103 for R&D work, aside from its limitations in routing 0.5mm BGAs, I've been generally impressed with what I've seen, we require accuracy (some RF) that I just can't achieve with non-commercial etching and the simple process to multi-layer is also helpful, however reading this forum post has opened my eyes to the fact it may not all be so clear-cut.

A year later, I would be interested in knowing if LPKF has resolved the problems highlighted in this post and what issues are still outstanding.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback you can offer.

[nctnico]

If you are into RF I suggest using a simulation tool like Sonnet. From my experience the simulation results are spot on compared with real world PCBs. And even if you can mill to tight tolerances the production PCB will be less accurate. Making multilayers sounds very clumsy to me. Unless your time is free getting an LPKF seems like a waste of time and money to me.

[G0HZU]

I've been using T-Tech and LPKF machines at home and at work for many years and they can give very impressive results. However, you do need to have training and experience to get the best from them or you will end up confused and bitter like free_electron and you can also easily damage the machine through inexperience/incompetence.

It's true that in 2014 other PCB prototyping options are now far more attractive for the majority of people but for rapid prototyping for RF work these milling machines are still hard to beat. You can also make front panels or laminated tools and even mill flexi cables with them.

Sonnet is very good and I use it a lot at work but it isn't ever going to be a complete solution because you can't easily simulate complex 3D enclosures and screens with it and it can't always model lumped components properly. So the rapid prototype from the T-tech or LPKF machine that you can hold in your hand and test is still very valid here. Especially if you mill a filter and you want to tweak it and have it ready for a presentation at a design review the same day.

These machines aren't for everyone, and the group of people that will get benefit from them is getting smaller every year because of other (mostly non RF) PCB prototyping options that are available at lower and lower prices.

If I thought they were as hopeless as some people here would have us believe than I would have got rid of both of my machines by now and the one at work would never see any use. But in fact, it gets used a LOT at work. Only one member of staff is allowed to use it because if you let untrained people use it then you end up with poor results and possibly a damaged milling machine.

[mazurov]

What is the reason to spend money on these machines? Here is a closeup of a board I just made on a regular non-dedicated mill (I mill aluminum on it, as well as plastic, wood, whatever ) with Bosch Colt palm router as a spindle. SO08 package with 0603 passives. With some difficulty, I can mill a trace between 0603 pads. Milled using eBay-sourced generic bits/FR-4, affixed to the base with a carpet tape; better resolution can be achieved using auto-leveler.

A setup like mine can be put together for less than US$800 - and this thing can do so much more than mill PCBs.

[G0HZU]

What is the reason to spend money on these machines?

In terms of value for money for the home user it's best to buy a used LPKF or T-Tech milling machine rather than a new one.

I bought my first T-Tech 7000S machine over 10yrs ago for about £800 including tools and PCB materials and Nilfisk extraction system and it can mill over a 19" x 13" area.

The second one was even cheaper but was faulty (needed new spindle bearings)

I've milled flexi cables with the T-Tech 7000S on double sided PCB material that is as thin and flexible as paper.