PCB Millings Machine

A circuit board will be needed for the CEB press as shown on p. 75 of the manual: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/images/f/f0/CEB_a-z_Build_1.0.pdf

I've been reading forums online which has me thinking of the merits of alternatively etching boards or paying to have boards milled through a fab house or a website such as (https://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs) on higher quality machines.

• https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=564629.0
• https://maker.pro/pcb/tutorial/how-to-make-your-own-pcbs-mill-or-etch
• Issues with PCB Milling Machine
  • Frequently replacing the cutters is expensive
  • The dust from milling is a health risk
  • Requires a very sturdy machine to get fine traces
  • Takes up space
• Advantages of milling machine
  • Fast and quality can be sufficient for quick and dirty prototyping

Buy a machine

Other DIY Models

Open Source Ecology Model

• There isn't a good guide yet at this point and I put everything that I could find here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QaWZdEN5IDSWqeFSDgNtt0B9zQ3tFxy01y3XMSk9lh0/edit#slide=id.g4d2d299b18_0_10
• Hopefully they put a better guide together soon, perhaps it will be included here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15a4kcnYKsOOQ84KmISsUypTjxuj5_jNW-7-RYuFjf5Y/edit#slide=id.g4303b70038_0_0
• This machine is an adaptation from the 3D printer and it appears that the conversion to the circuit mill just requires some additional 3D printed parts

My Thought

• As I understand it, etching boards seems like more of a process one would use to make higher quality boards with the photoboard/dry film process being for making many duplicate high quality boards
• The options as I see them:
  • Since we don't need many PCB boards at this time we just buy some and don't worry about milling them ourselves until we get into designing our own boards and need to run through prototypes
  • We buy an inexpensive milling machine model for now, play with it and see if we can get something usable
  • Work on converting the 3D printer to a milling machine and hope that we get high-quality boards to justify the investment

• To create our own custom boards, I've read of a couple websites that you can use to design the board including:
  • MultiSim: a circuit simulator program to solve for voltage and current in a circuit
  • CircuitLab (www.circuitlab.com): web-based electronics simulator that is easy to use and has a nice graphical interface

Scharf went ahead and bought the milling machine shown above from Amazon as well as a laser attachment.

Although at the top of this page I explained where in the CEB press manual it calls for a custom milled circuit board, it appears that the latest version does not require this. However, this machine may be helpful in future projects.