While the blog may have been a little inactive, the bench has not. Lots of things on the go and thought I’d bring the blog up to date.
Since my last etching a board entry I started to have problems etching boards. I never did figure out what my problem was, but it was very frustrating as I did have this process down pat. No matter what I did I could not get the toner to transfer properly onto the pcb. In the end I decided that it was time to explore the cnc world. It was something I had wanted to try out for a while anyway.
I ordered the Prover 3018 along with extra bits and a spoil board. Assembly went well and naturally took a lot longer than what the instructions said it would. I was very pleased with the quality of the 3018 and it was a pleasant build.
The learning curve was fairly steep in order to get to actually milling a pcb. Between figuring out how to use 2 new software packages, Flatcam and Candle, and then all the different settings and how they work together, it was several days before milling a board that I could use.
Briefly, the biggest mistake I did was starting out to mill a SC70 size footprint. My thoughts here was if I figure this size out the rest come easy. Once I went to the larger smd sizes things went much better. After I learn the in’s and out’s the SC70 size will be next.
The other main issue was in Candle. The program that uploads the g code to the mill. It took me hours before I figured out which button to press to get the milling process to start. Uploading the g code went fine but then the mill would stop. I spent a lot of time learning the g code and viewing videos and basically go nowhere. Turns out after you hit the send button the mill starts up and goes to a safe position and stops. You then have to hit the Pause button to start the process. Who’d have thought you need to press pause to start things? Maybe its me but I don’t think so.
I’ll save my adventure with my DCV Frequency Data Logger project for the next post.
73, Peter
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