I can't see any way to do this, reliably. So, imagine a house won't let it through DRCs, regardless of diameter or weight of foil, etc.
Or, is there another (not exhorbitantly pricey) technology for precisely cutting boards that would keep the structure (at least the part that is not lost to the cut) mechanically (and thus electrically) intact?
Else, I will use another -- more expectantly reliable -- approach
Un bel giorno Don Y digitò:
The keyword to look for is "castellated holes". The easier way to do it is to find a manufacturer that explicitly supports them, and follow their instructions. For example:
It's called castelleaton, or mouse bites. I do it fairly often. Works fine.
Our PCB houses don't like the drill to be any smaller than 16 mils.
I recently had a few hundred small adapter boards made by a UK manufacturer with plated castellated edges. The finished hole diameter was 0.7mm, board thickness was 0.8mm. The only problem was that the part of the hole that was meant to be cut away remained partly in place as a copper burr. I did need to trim these away with a scalpel. The manufacturer had warned me that this would probably happen and would only make the boards on that basis. Larger holes would have been fine. John
Usually the cutting is with a 2mm router and the holes are much smaller than that. so afterwards you only get one half of each hole.
I suppose you could do vee groove instead of routing but I'd worry aboout the copper tearing when the boards are separated. (or maybe the copper would damage or contaminate the saw so they refuse this)
as I unserstand it they are drilled at the same time as other plated holes and slots and then after plating, etching, and mask the edges are cut.
I'm pretty sure they mean egde of your board outline.
That process wouldn’t leave copper hackles behind, so it obviously isn’t universal.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Just plop ordinary pth holes and have the outline or panelization routing path saw them in half. It's no big deal. No special tools needed.
Possibly a bad translation from Chinese. doing hole plating after edge milling seems like very difficult task.
Others say that only a specialised milling process is needed Both copper and glass are hard to mill, copper is soft and gummy and glass is hard and brittle, so the combination is real tricky.
There's a checkbox for casellation on their quote form, (click customised service and advanced options) it seems to add about $16 if you want 5 boards, and about $350 if you want 500 boards
I don't know if you're buying sharper (or special) router bits, shorter board stacks, or a slower feed rate with the extra dollars, but I doubt it's buying extra process steps.
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