Sunday, June 6, 2010

Milling Circuit Boards



I purchased a Proxxon high-speed (20K RPM!) spindle for milling circuit boards.  After devising a way to attach the spindle to my milling machine, I used eagle (and the pcb-gcode script) to generate the G-code for the following simple board.  This board contains a microcontroller (the 8-lead device in the center), an 0805 resistor, and several pads to attach wires.
After running the g-code on the milling machine, I ended up with the following circuit board.
Then I installed some components and attached wires for power.  The micro is programmed using the 4 surface mount pads between the micro and the wires.  I wrote a program to blink out "HI" in Morse code on the LED.