Cifrocco said:
Does anyone have experience or suggestions regarding the milling of PCB's. This of course is an alternative to etching them. I found a nice Sherline CNC mill which can do just about anything, but uses g-code to drive the mill as is customary. To be able to mill a PCB one would need to convert Gerber code or other into g-code. I'll probably buy the mill system anyways because it's so cool, but I would love to have it mill my PCB's.
Hi!
I own a Sherline 2000. I ordered the mill with the stepper motor adapters, but no control. I ordered the stepper motors from Automation Direct because, they are bipolar, whereas, the Sherline stepper motors are unipolar. I then built a control using Gecko stepper motor drives and a 5 ampere 24 VDC switching power supply. I laid out a DB25 LPT adapter PCB with screw style terminal strips to interconnect the gecko drives. I had a spare PC and used the evaluation version of Mach3 to operate the mill.
Until recently, I used a PCB layout program called HiWire II. This is a 25 year old DOS program that, I've had for nearly as long.
About 5 years ago, I purchased a MAX-NC5 and, at that time I wrote two script files that allowed me to extract the drilling and milling coordinates from the HiWire II PCB layout. But, I wasn't really happy with the software that MAX-NC provided and hence, my evaluation of Mach3.
Recently, I bought a license for Mach 3 and also a professional version of the CadSoft Eagle PCB software. That left me sort of lame for drilling and milling Eagle PCBs. I have written a script file to extract drill coordinates from Eagle but not routing, as yet.
At about the same time that I purchases the Mach3 license, I discovered PCB-G-code. This is a program that will allow you to drill, mechanically etch and route double sided PCBs. PCB-G-code is located at:
https://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=pcb-gcode
I haven't actually mechanically etched a PCB yet as, I don't have any milling bits that are capable of doing the job. But, I have drilled and routed several PCBs using PCB data that PCB-G-code extracted from Eagle and, I was pleased with the results.
I hope this helps a little bit and, I hope the little excursion about my machines wasn't too boring.
Thanks!