[HN Gopher] The Circuit Graver, an interesting new way to fab PC...
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       The Circuit Graver, an interesting new way to fab PCBs at home
        
       Author : zakqwy
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2024-11-04 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hackaday.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.io)
        
       | zakqwy wrote:
       | I designed and fabricated a weird 3D printed 4-axis CNC machine
       | (in ~3 months, oof) which uses carbide inserts to carve tiny
       | isolation routes in chunks of PCB substrate. It's very much a
       | finicky proof-of-concept, and may very well host fatal hidden
       | gremlins which doom the project to novelty status, but with a bit
       | of care I can produce boards with 6/6 design rules (0.15 mm
       | spaces and traces) at 20-30 mm/s, roughly an order of magnitude
       | faster than a desktop mill with significantly less noise.
       | 
       | I gave a talk this weekend on the machine at the eighth Hackaday
       | Supercon, which will be on YouTube at some point, but for now
       | here is a link to the project page, including design files and a
       | few dozen hasty project logs.
        
         | buescher wrote:
         | Oh that's so cool. I love the ribbons of copper curling up.
         | Might be ok for use cases like prototyping antennas - one place
         | I'd still use a pcb mill for the the turnaround time. How is it
         | at removing larger areas of copper?
        
           | zakqwy wrote:
           | It's probably not excellent; the grooves are V-shaped and the
           | machine isn't stiff enough to go very deep, so you'd need to
           | take a lot of passes. But a crosshatch toolpath might pull up
           | extra copper on the sides and make fills quickly. I'll run
           | some tests when I'm back home and report back! Would be neat
           | to be able to prototype RF trace circuits same-day.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-04 23:02 UTC)