another hack

We have two shears at work, a rusty old piece of junk hand shear and a nice foot shear with clamps. I'm not allowed to cut FR4 on the nice one.

The SOT23 pattern is intentional.

I have a pair of Wiss serrated aircraft shears that works well on FR4. Still cuts well after 10 years or so, but isn't quite as neat.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes, I have sent some gold boards to customers, and they were impressed. Unfortunately, they were free.

The dental burr cuts freehand best at an angle, but might work at 90 degrees if everything is rigid.

That's where my thinking was going. Secure the dremel to a mount with a 0.1" foot operated lift. Then have adjustable guides. Set you guide, drop the burr, slide PCB against guide to make the cut, lift burr. Guide would need to be easily adjustable, maybe coarse set, then vernier adjust. Now it's getting complicated. Mikek

This board took maybe 15 minutes, but it is more complex than what I usually do. I've tried disk cutters, and they don't work freehand. You can't control the depth of the cut, and start/ends are ugly, and they skip around. The burr, at about a 45 degree angle, has really nice control. It cuts copper and FR4 beautifully and doesn't gunk up with copper.

Maybe you could try it your way and post some pics.

Dremel. Burr. Simple.

On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 11:25:14 -0500, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

That is actually pretty cheap..

And likely only because there is no tooling charge since there is no etch or pattern to make or vias to drill, etc.

Den onsdag den 9. december 2015 kl. 17.38.30 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

uld get inspired by this :

eagle has a nice script that turns a board into g-code for outlining, drilling and milling

mount the board, home the machine, probe the tool height, and go have coffe e

-Lasse

I mean the price point of the finished product, silly. If I spend a day working on a proto made from 1/10 of a $100 board, the materials cost is not going to be too significant.

I'm just not as posh as John. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

could get inspired by this :

make a pantorouter:

to cut straight line just run the pointer along a straight edge

-Lasse

The key to precision in this sort of thing is the ergonomics. With your hands on either side of the drill press base, you can use your small muscles for the full motion, which makes it much easier to control. Same with fine-pitch soldering.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Den onsdag den 9. december 2015 kl. 14.38.20 UTC+1 skrev Spehro Pefhany:

uld get inspired by this :

SolI

you could use linuxcnc, I believe Tormachs new pathpilot software is based on linuxcnc

or find an arduino and a parallelport connector and run GRBL

I ported GRBL to run on a stack of ST devkits with an STM32f4 and stepperdr ivers

~$30 worth of electronics to run a 3D cnc

-Lasse

It's an art form, and art never makes sense.

Yup ! we did it here at SERES months ago ... i could not describe precisely how they manage stuff but it works great even for a small 24 pins QFN case (it's a nRF24LE1 based design) ... just for fun ;-)

Habib.

I think one of those little cnc routers but running it in manual mode would be the way to go. The only operations would be to raise and lower the router and turn the x and y knobs to get nice straight lines. Read the position off the screen if you need to know dimensions. No guides to adjust like a drill press setup or worries about board dust in the ways of a mill table, no pc or programming, and probably only have to set the tool height once for each batch of material. If you did hook up a pc I wonder if you could record the input commands so you could replicate a board after you freehanded the first one?

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Den onsdag den 9. december 2015 kl. 14.38.20 UTC+1 skrev Spehro Pefhany:

you could use linuxcnc, I believe Tormachs new pathpilot software is based on linuxcnc

or find an arduino and a parallelport connector and run GRBL

I ported GRBL to run on a stack of ST devkits with an STM32f4 and stepperdrivers

~$30 worth of electronics to run a 3D cnc

-Lasse

I can't help but notice that the top and bottom half ground planes don't connect... is the other side plated as well? Is that what the extra solder blobs are, or are those wires? If so, why are they so far apart? Or are you relying on the two connectors to bridge the ground planes?

Den onsdag den 9. december 2015 kl. 19.29.19 UTC+1 skrev Carl Ijames:

gcode is just text and extremely simple, you can easily write it by hand. or just use one of the numerous programs to draw and make gcode

-Lasse