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Nov
30
Written by:
Gary Holbrook
11/30/2008 6:48 PM
The drill pattern in the above piece of copper clad board is less than two inches on a side. Probably about 1.75 inches. You will notice that the holes are perfectly aligned, but there is no visible pattern on the board. As I wrote previously, I intend to begin using my CNC mill to drill my circuit boards. This is the first example that was drilled using my mill, and they were drilled without any manual intervention. The mask from which the drill pattern came is shown below.
If you're very detail oriented, you noticed that three holes are missing from the copper board. This is because I was using a demo computer aided manufacturing program that only processes the first 250 lines of G-Code.
The very, very good news is that the holes lined up precisely when I laid the etching mask over them. It really is a shame that I didn't get off my bum and set my mill up for this a long time ago. Like the time I drilled 144 holes in circuit board that turned out to be a failure anyway. Just an example...
This evening I got most of the backlash out of the mill. The X and Y axes both seem very tight, so my next stunt will be an attempt to do isolation routing in this board using an endmill. I expect that will work, as the chip is at a 1mm pitch. The next board I try will be at .5mm pitch, and I expect it to fail. Any backlash would be magnified so much that getting it to work properly seems unlikely. There is only .5mm between traces on the chip, which means that the general spacing on the rest of the board is also just as fine.
Still, I'm more than ecstatic that the second most labor intensive part of prototyping a board is now automated.
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