PCB Milling
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| Categories | Electronics, PCB/Circuitry Making
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One obvious goal of making a RepRap replicatable is getting it to make it's own PCBs or other electronic circuitries. Recent firmwares understand a pretty standard flavour of GCode, opening the door to a lot of toolpaths already exiting. This page describes a few promising ones.
Software suites
While a gazillion of softwares for creating and manufacturing circuits and PCBs exists, it was surprisingly difficult to find a working combination. As RepRap is open source, we want also to use open source tools for designing RepRap stuff, of course.
All applications described claim to run on all major OSs: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X. Testing was done on Ubuntu 10.04, 64-bit version.
Eagle
While Eagle is a proprietary and closed source tool, an almost full functional, free evaluation version exists. The only limitation is the maximum size of the resulting PCBs. Eagle is widely used among hobbyists and currently most RepRap designs are made with it, too.
Eagle is helpful for us in
- Schematic design.
- PCB design.
- Mill/Drill file creation (Gerber).
KiCad
KiCad is the rising star on the open source PCB creation sky. It's GPLv2 and in terms of features and user interface quite comparable to Eagle.
KiCad is helpful for us in
- Schematic design.
- PCB design.
- Mill/Drill file creation (Gerber).
- Creating offsets for isolation milling (HPGL).
Fritzing
Fritzing is finally(!) a schematic and PCB editor with a user interface for mere humans. As a highlight, you can pick and place electronic components just like you'd do this on a breadboard on your real desk. The schematic editor autoroutes connections similar to the PCB autorouter to tidy them up and all three parts - breadboard, schematic, PCB - are always kept in sync.
While this application is a very promising approach, it currently lacks a serious library. However, an Eagle to Fritzing converter is in the works, so this problem might be solved soon.
Fritzing is helpful for us in
- Schematic design.
- PCB design.
- Mill/Drill file creation (Gerber).
Replath
Replath is RepRap's own effort to create a PCB manufacturing application. I'm not sure about it's status, as the last Wiki edit is from October 2008 and obviously the app's name got forgotten in the recent (September 2010) discussion about how to reprap PCBs.
Replath helpful for us for
- Creating offsets for isolation milling.
- Gcode file creation.
- Sending the GCode file to the RepRap machine controller.
Example Circuits
- Opto Endstop made by Gavilan.
- Fabio: Arduino compatible microcontroller board.
- Hydra doing PCB milling by Clayton.
- Adventures with Atmel AVRs and CNC PCB engraving by Alan Garfield.
- TINYPOV Milling Challenge by Gatonero.
- First PCB milling success gives a few good hints on how to avoid burr.
