Mar
17

CNC circuit board mill – in-progress

By DW

I pulled the CNC circuit board mill that I designed and built out of my basement lab and brought it to kwartzlab. I’m working with Karl on the CNC-DIY-FUN theme. This is a 3-axis vertical mill that I built with just a drill press and a hacksaw. The design goals were low-cost and accuracy down to 0.001″ to allow milling of circuit boards. While the mechanics of this mill were worked out a while back, it does need better driver electronics and some tramming. Karl, Ben, and I are putting together a kwartzlab toolchain for doing CNC milling (which would also support the eventual laser cutter). The idea is that we will all use the same tools in order to share knowledge/scripts/code/designs and get something together that just works. The components will be:

CAD or vector-graphics based program for design
CAM to convert design files to a tool path for cutting
Mill driver software to interpret the CAM-generated gcode and drive the mill’s cutting head

We’re building our own tools to support our vision of rapid prototyping, where we can go into the lab with an idea and have a working prototype in our hands within hours instead of weeks or months. That’s the goal. If you’d like to donate tools or materials, please contact me.

More after the break…

The notion of rapid prototyping takes on many forms at kwartzlab. Gertie the Cow, for example, is realized in textiles by the very talented Alex Dysinski.