I understand the desire to mill your own PCB, but if it's a board you want
to use in a real application (not just testing footprints or layouts) I
would strong suggest using a real fab. The benefits (real soldermask to
protect from stray wires, real ENIG plating to protect against corrosion,
real plated through-holes to save you from having to solder each via by
hand, etc) strongly outweigh the $5/sq inch for three copies of the board,
such as offered by my favorite PCB prototype service https://oshpark.com/ -
If you are in a rush or just want to test that your footprint for a new
part is correct, a mill would be great, and also really fun (my
side-business has an othermill for this purpose).
Good luck!
-Matthew IV
On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 5:21 PM, Steven Owens <stevenjowens@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I haven't tried it yet, but Bob mentioned a couple weeks ago that you
can make a diagram in inkscape (which speaks SVG) and then import it
into MakerCAM and add depth and export it as GCode.
The other alternative (again, courtesy of Bob) is getting it into
Sketchup and use a free plugin from the Sketchup Marketplace to export
it to STL, which again can be converted into GCode.
I think Bob said he uses MeshCAM, which is commercial ($250) but worth
it in Bob's opinion.
There's also PyCAM, which is free but produces suboptimal instruction
sets (may take longer because it doesn't sequence steps intelligently,
etc).
I really need to get my hands dirty with the CNC, sometime soon.
Steve
On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Ryan J. Priore <ryan.priore@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I have a PCB that I want to mill. I made it in Fritzing, and I can exportI
the following file types for PCB manufacturing: PDF, SVG, and Gerber. If
wanted to mill it on either the Boxzy or our CNC mill, what format offile
would I require? I have end mills and copper clad stock. I would justneed a
training session.
Thank you in advance,
Ryan
--
Steven J. Owens
stevenjowens@xxxxxxxxx
puff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
412-401-8060
