Managed to get my machine to route a pcb and thought I'd show off.

Managed to get my machine to route a pcb and thought I’d show off.

I’m using a leadscrew driven Ox CNC variant with a 1m x 1m bed.

Chilipeppr has worked really well over the last few months and I’ve been able to push the machine. I’ve not done any 3D work yet, but that’s on the list.

I use a custom TinyG variant running on a Arduino Due board with a custom daughter/driver. Track and gap capability is about 0.25mm/0.5mm. So far, so good.

That does look really nice. Now you may run into your 2nd phase of problems I’ve run into a lot, which is without solder mask I’d get bridging on traces after soldering. Really frustrating.

Yes, that’s always an issue with homebrew. But no farting about with UV and chemicals anymore! Freedom!

I have a commercial machine for doing these and I make them all the time at work. I love having fast double-sided through-hole capability. If you increase the isolation up to 10 mils or so it helps reduce bridging somewhat.

Early days yet. Will see what is needed in terms of clean-up on this one. But I definitely see the value of your point…

Chilipeppr’s memory limits will limit the size of any 2.5d project. I do not know how you can do true 3d with Chilipeppr (4 or 5 axis). I use Chilipeppr for small 2.5d and have managed to work around the limits by milling rectangular sections that overlap, but that is painful for anything large.
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@David_Coones How did you manage the PCB autoleveling with ArduinoDue and what is the firmware you used? I had a lot of problems with probing the whole board on Due. After breaking few expensive bits I gave up and switched back to TinyG.

@David_Coones How did you manage the PCB autoleveling with ArduinoDue and what is the firmware you used? I had a lot of problems with probing the whole board on Due. After breaking few expensive bits I gave up and switched back to TinyG.

@sszafran I used the due port of the tinyg code. It can be found on github - I’ll have to look it up to find it. I made a custom daughter board to interface it, then tuned the code to my machine and it works great. No bells or whistles, but the jerk based movement is impressive.

No autolevelling for me. It’s all manual. I mapped my bed and used a nice flat spot for my pcb jig. I spent a lot of time getting my table flat. In fact the surface roughness on the bed is worse than the (average) flatness of it. At least it was when I mapped it - over a year ago. But it’s still producing good results. One big thing is that I don’t use a sacrificial bed. I think that helps to keep things fairly consistent.