Tag Archives: PCB

Othermill on Kickstarter: a robust, personal CNC machine for milling circuit boards and more

via Arduino Blog

My friend Jonathan Ward and the rest of the team at Otherfab have posted their new CNC milling machine, the Othermill, to KickStarter. This is a robust, low-cost machine for milling circuit boards, wax molds, wood, aluminum and more. The machine is made from high density polyethylene with an ingenious snap-fit mechanism that’s strong, reversible, and easy-to-assemble (although the machines will come fully assembled). There are lots of other clever features to ensure good alignment, minimal / non-existent slop, and quiet / robust performance. The working area is 5.5 x 4.5 x 1.4″ and the machine itself is only 10 inches cubed.

This is a great tool for milling your own circuit boards, something that’s done a lot in How to Make (Almost) Anything and at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms generally. It handles relatively fine-pitched components (down to 1/64″ or even 0.010″ between traces) and is great for doing arbitrary shapes and cut outs. Here are some examples from the Othermill KickStarter page.

Jonathan has a long history of making milling machines, and I’m excited to see them get out into the world.

Find out more or support the project on KickStarter.

Custom boards at home without etching

via Hack a Day» hardware

PCB

PC board houses are getting more accessable and less expensive all the time. Some of us are even getting very, very good at making our own circuit boards at home. There are times, though, when a project or prototype requires an extremely cheap custom board right now, something etching a custom board won’t allow. [KopfKopfKopfAffe] has a unique solution to this problem, able to create custom boards in under an hour without any nasty chemicals.

Instead of starting his build with copper-clad board, [KopfAffe] used every rapid prototyper’s friend, simple one-sided perf board. The shape of the board was milled out on a CNC machine, and both the top silk screen and bottom layer were marked off using the toner transfer method. After that, a custom circuit is just a matter of placing components and putting solder bridges between all the marked pads.

[KopfAffe] is only using this technique for single-sided boards, but we don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be employed for simple double-sided boards. This would still have the problem of making vias between the layers, but that’s still a problem with proper, home-etched double sided boards.


Filed under: hardware

Finding the cheapest board house

via Hack a Day» hardware

PCB

The prices for custom made circuit boards has never been cheaper, but surprisingly we’ve never seen a comparison of prices between the major board houses. [Brad] took the time to dig in to the price of 10 boards manufactured by Seeed Studios, OHS Park, and BatchPCB. He made some pretty graphs and also answered the question of where you can get your circuits made cheaply.

[Brad] got the prices for boards up to 20 cm x 20 cm from Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB service, OSH Park, and BatchPCB. These results were graphed with Octave and showed some rather surprising results.

For boards over 20 cm2, the cheapest option is Seeed Studios. In fact, the price difference between Seeed and the other board houses for the maximum sized board is impressive; a 400 cm2 board from Seeed costs $150, while the same board from OSH Park is close to $1000.

Of course most boards are much smaller, so the bottom line is  for boards less than 20 cm2, your best bet is to go with OHS Park. If you don’t care when your boards arrive, or you need more than 10 or so, Seeed is the way to go. As far as the quality of the boards go, OSH Park is up there at the top as well.


Filed under: hardware

Goes to Canterbury! (Collaboration, building communities, surface mount adventures)

via OSHUG

For our 11th meeting, we are visiting the School of Engineering and Digital Arts at the University of Kent. Trains run regularly to and from central London and take approximately an hour. For anyone wishing to stay overnight please see the list of accommodation.

Open Source Hardware Collaboration

An assessment of the current state of the art in hardware collaboration through a tour of a series of Open Source Hardware projects. How easy is it to discover projects, view and understand their designs, build your own version and contribute changes back?

Paul Downey (psd) is a doodling software hacker, former member of Osmosoft — a small Open Source software team where he represented BT at the W3C, a co-organiser of OSHUG and a co-founder of SolderPad, a collaboration platform for electronic design.

Building open, communicating communities

The hardware engineering community is typically seen as fragmented, closed and conservative, shackled by the dependency on restrictive closed-source tools. Thankfully, we are now at a time where this is changing. In this talk, Saar Drimer will discuss his efforts to bring the FPGA community together so we can reach the level of sharing and project integration that the open source software community currently enjoys. The end goal is to reach a state where projects are integrated in a similar way to what Linux's package mangers enable: "sudo apt-get ddr2-controller". [Background reading].

Saar Drimer is an experienced hardware engineer. In the past he's hacked the UK's Chip and PIN payment system, and advocated reproducible research practices in the engineering sciences. Now he's working on boldport, an "IndieEDA" company that aims to make HW/FPGA easier.

Adventures in working with surface mount devices

An ambitious open source hardware project--Amino--recently called for Alan Wood to uplift his home lab to support prototyping, testing and basic production using surface mount devices. Alan will be sharing with us some of the things he has learnt, and giving us a run through what you might require in order to tackle working with surface mount devices yourself. Rather than using expensive off-the-shelf tooling, Alan will be covering a number of affordable approaches that make this possible without breaking the bank.

Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, got lost in software engineering and open source for a decade, before returning back to his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement that has gathered momentum over the last few years.

Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Parking is available at the Jennison Building, however, please ensure that you are parked within a bay.

Goes to Canterbury! (Collaboration, building communities, surface mount adventures)

via OSHUG

For our 11th meeting, we are visiting the School of Engineering and Digital Arts at the University of Kent. Trains run regularly to and from central London and take approximately an hour. For anyone wishing to stay overnight please see the list of accommodation.

Open Source Hardware Collaboration

An assessment of the current state of the art in hardware collaboration through a tour of a series of Open Source Hardware projects. How easy is it to discover projects, view and understand their designs, build your own version and contribute changes back?

Paul Downey (psd) is a doodling software hacker, former member of Osmosoft — a small Open Source software team where he represented BT at the W3C, a co-organiser of OSHUG and a co-founder of SolderPad, a collaboration platform for electronic design.

Building open, communicating communities

The hardware engineering community is typically seen as fragmented, closed and conservative, shackled by the dependency on restrictive closed-source tools. Thankfully, we are now at a time where this is changing. In this talk, Saar Drimer will discuss his efforts to bring the FPGA community together so we can reach the level of sharing and project integration that the open source software community currently enjoys. The end goal is to reach a state where projects are integrated in a similar way to what Linux's package mangers enable: "sudo apt-get ddr2-controller". [Background reading].

Saar Drimer is an experienced hardware engineer. In the past he's hacked the UK's Chip and PIN payment system, and advocated reproducible research practices in the engineering sciences. Now he's working on boldport, an "IndieEDA" company that aims to make HW/FPGA easier.

Adventures in working with surface mount devices

An ambitious open source hardware project--Amino--recently called for Alan Wood to uplift his home lab to support prototyping, testing and basic production using surface mount devices. Alan will be sharing with us some of the things he has learnt, and giving us a run through what you might require in order to tackle working with surface mount devices yourself. Rather than using expensive off-the-shelf tooling, Alan will be covering a number of affordable approaches that make this possible without breaking the bank.

Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, got lost in software engineering and open source for a decade, before returning back to his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement that has gathered momentum over the last few years.

Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Parking is available at the Jennison Building, however, please ensure that you are parked within a bay.