PCB Milling
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| License | unknown
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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 here run on all major OSs: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X.
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.
- Routing.
- Mill file creation.
- Drill file creation.
KiCAD
Fritzing
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 helps us for
- Creating offsets for isolation milling.
- Gcode file creation.
- Sending the GCode file to the RepRap machine controller.
