pcb thru hole drilling machine controled by arduino

I picked up some 80-20 aluminum extrusion at the local scrap yard and got thinking I really ought to use it for something. So went cruising on the internet and found a little desktop cnc machine sold for drilling pcb's.

They are from China and sell for about $250 on AliExpress. Did not find any on Ebay. Was going to post the Ebay item number.

Has anyone bought and used one? With some more software you could mill circuit boards too.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster
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I have a concert 6040, but that's bigger and AFAIR was a 2000 USD machine

Works great, haven't used it for isolation milling yet though

Cheers

Klaus

Reply to
klaus.kragelund

Mechanics might not be up to it- backlash and not designed for side loads- ball screws would be a really good feature, but I don't think that's in the cards for $250. I

f they're using the same steppers and controllers that the 3d printers are using it's probably reasonably usable for hole drilling at least.

The execrable 4 axis NEMA23 controller boards are garbage.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany 
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

On Sunday, September 4, 2016 at 6:21:16 PM UTC-4, Spehro Pefhany wrote: >

Best I can guess is that they use stainless screws and bronze antibacklash nuts.

These are very small machines. The photos all avoid having anything in the picture that would give an idea of the size.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

My machine weighed 62kg gross (two boxes, 136 pounds total).. that's a lot of weight to ship by Fedex halfway around the planet.

Little machines don't have to be nearly as heavy to be as stiff.

Sounds like a fun purchase.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany 
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Think it through before you go too far down a path...

I tried to build a drill machine from a Dremel mounted on a 3-axis manipulator.

I was using a pen plotter to plot the traces. Only .005" resolution, so had to abandon that.

I switched to toner transfer for the boards, so I had to scale the Gerber file to match the not-quite-exact scale of the printer. That left the issues with paper stretch and alignment on the board.

Ended up building a jig to project a cross-hair on the board to align it in the drill fixture and a program to do the offsets.

Bottom line was that it was quicker to drill by hand than to get the jury-rig set up.

Reply to
mike

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