Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: PatM on October 29, 2007, 12:56:52 AM
-
I have some UTube videos up of making a muffin company sign and I just filmed the making of a PCB. This is for a DIP board but I'll be adding video for surface mount tomorrow. Sometime in the next week or two I'll edit the many bits into a primer for routing PCBs. For now there's just two parts (about 4 minutes total) of raw footage - one checking runout (can you say ZERO!) and the other the start of the etching MOP.
I made the traces 0.014" and most of the pads 0.060" but I can do quite a bit smaller (with Mach's help of course!).
Mach ain't just for "heavy metal".
Runout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzSjIV9tr3E
Etching
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUDW5pQbxAY
The muffin sign video is in the Artsoft group already but for those not really up on youtube (like me until I actually put videos up)
Part 1 - introducing the software - ~5 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9fG8trDLxQ
part 2 - V-Carving ~8 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtmUbquYuuI
-
Hi PatM,
interesting videos, what software did you use to produce the PCB layout?
Graham.
-
I used DipTrace ( www.diptrace.com ) for the schematic and board layout. I actually prefer a little know program called QCad ( www.winqcad.com ) but its DXF/PDF output isn't really suitable for mechanical etching. They look fine until you reduce the line size to to "1" and they you see that circles aren't even close to connected at the ends etc. That might have been corrected in the two years since I last bought an update.
Diptrace was cheaper than a QCad upgrade and its DXF output is almost perfect. The only problem being a few redundant line segments that I have to find and delete before Visual Mill will stop complaining about open curves. When I first tried there were quite a few redundant lines but one email and sample file to the author and most of those disappeared. I just have to stop procrastinating and send another sample with the remaining ones and that'll probably be eliminated in the next maintenance release.
Almost forgot; for some reason if I export the drill pattern seperately VisualMill will sometimes report that the file is empty. I just load into Rhino then save as 3dm (no other action) and that makes Visual Mill happy.