Homemade PCB Plotter

First thing to decide is what accuracy and precision you need. Well funded design teams spent decades constructing mechanical systems with the required accuracy, lack of backlash, lack of system mechanical resonances etc. Sounds simple, but there's a lot of magic in there.

Find yourself a surplus flat-bed plotter. I use a TEK 4662. Any software will output gerber. You can easily write a gerber translator that drives the plotter. My 4662 has served me well until recently when I tried to do a TQFP64-1001 chip. Can't seem to corece the software to route on the

5mil grid that is the best the plotter can do. Roundoff error is killing me.

mike

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Return address is VALID.
500MHz Tek DSOscilloscope TDS540 $2200
http://nm7u.tripod.com/homepage/te.html
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Bunch of stuff For Sale and Wanted at the link below.
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Join this Yahoo group:

Several people there have done that sort of thing.

Leon

In article , Jeremy Samuels writes

Re the software part ...

Vutrax for Linux (as well as Windows) can natively output to many vector driven devices including HPGL (Hewlett Packard Pen plotters), Gerber 274X (automatic aperture allocation) or photoplot with user specified apertures including construction of all items from a single 'aperture', Housten Instrument pen plotters, 'Excellon' CNC drilling and Milling assorted formats. Full control of scaling and orientation (including mirroring) can be applied. Vutrax can be used for schematic entry, routing and PCB layout or for simple manual layouts. Visit either of

(Main UK site for Vutrax CAD) (Central Europe Mirror) to download the 256 pin evaluation/free version.

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Roy Battell.
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    Mail: news@vutrax666.co.uk

Unless you want to do it for fun, don't. You won't save money. You can get files converted to films cheaply, and even board making is rather cheap. Board stock isn't a significant component of the cost.

John Nagle