CNC Resources for PCB generation

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seaton
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CNC Resources for PCB generation

Post by seaton » Sun Sep 11, 2016 6:06 pm

Here is a list of resources relating to milling your own PCB via CNC

http://www.chilipeppr.com/ open source CNC controller supporting GRBL and TinyG controllers, this is something you load the GCode into and then it sends to your CNC device. Ive tried both GRB and TinyG. TinyG seems more supported and has some more features. I had issues with PCB levelling with GRBL workspace. Only issue I have with it is thats tis browser based and requires an internet connection initially.

http://www.linuxcnc.org/ Realtime Linux CNC controller like Chilipeppr, have not yet tried but seems popular out there and well supported.

http://www.machsupport.com/ MAch3 (Commercial) - seems to be the default standard for CNC controllers out there for hobbyists and is very feature packed.

http://www.flatcam.org/ allows you to generate isolation milling from gerber files, is a little cumbersome but works well once you get the hang of it, has a GUI and is python based so will run on a number of different platforms. Appears to be very popular. Work with no problems on chilipeppr. One of the things I dislike about this is the inability to define plunge rates on Z-Axis and to create a single Gcode file for the complete job.

http://www.coppercam.com non-free isolation milling for PCB has a free trial and appears to do a great job. Free trial is limited in the gcode and drill output. ~$100

http://pcbgcode.org/ another free PCB gcode generator, have not yet tried this one yet, but appears to be command line driven, but will run on multi platform. There is a GUI out there that someone has developed for it, but nothing like flatcam or coppercam. Does have ability to generate Levelling code as part of the job.

http://rapid-pcb.com cloud based PCB-Gcode solution and is free, I have tried and works ok but is limited to single layer. I think it uses PCB2gcode on the backend

parkview
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Re: CNC Resources for PCB generation

Post by parkview » Sat Sep 17, 2016 5:20 pm

thanks for these and the PCB design links.

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