Re: Help: PCB Trace Milling Software

Ballendo and the List,

I hadn't thought about CorelTRACE. I'll see what I can do with it. And
thanks to all those who posted websites or references for milling PCB
traces! That's great! ZTRACE, EAGLE and Deskam2000 look very
promising!

Although it might be fun to program it too!

And Mike, if you're the first to get PCB's going, DO give us a report!
With all the new Ideas I see, it will be a while before I start on it.

Alan Great list!


ballendo@... wrote:

>
> Alan,
>
> You can do simple to medium boards with a raster to vector converter
> like CorelTRACE. Just import the Pcb image and "trace" it (on another
> layer).Be sure to clean it up, and remember to run as fast as you can
> (spindle AND feedrate) BEWARE of tiny, CONDUCTIVE copper "slivers"
> with this method. (More likely at slow spindle speeds and feedrates.)
>
> In the last two days I posted a couple of commercial solutions, but
> for a lot of stuff the above works.
>
> Think and tinker(on the web) has the cutting bits to do a good job.
>
> In days of old, photo plotters used for pc bd's actually had cutouts
> in a sheet of material to define the apertures. These were rotated
> into position(like a viewmaster toy, or a turret punch), and a light
> source flashed on or off as necessary. Lines(traces) were made by
> moving the board under the aperture(while the light was on).
>
> Nowadays, the apertures are digitally created "virtually" from an
> "aperture list" of instructions/definitions, usually in the header of
> the file. And lasers do the "plotting".
>
> Gerber used to put out a book of specs. for the RS-274X code. For
> anybody who doesn't already know, Gerber Scientific, as one of the
> main players in the CNC world early on, co-opted the gcode spec. and
> called it gerber(for both their routers and photo plotters). So
> "Gerber" files are just ANOTHER couple of flavors of Gcode.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Ballendo
>