Newbie on Kicad

Author	Message
Dinosaur Guru Joined: 12/08/2011 Location: Australia Posts: 322	Posted: 06:46am 25 Dec 2023       Hi All   Quote   What you need to do now is re- configure a 3D printer to print copper tracks onto a blank fibreglass board, are you up to that challenge Someone is already doing that except with silver oxide and then baking it. I was not impressed with ragged edges of the tracks and pads. If the router has decent tolerances than I think it is still better then Laser. The videos I have seen seem to spend a lot of time tuning the power to prevent burning. With a 30 degree 3mm tapered cutter I am getting great results on fine text, so I am confident it will repeat that performance on the pcb. Start off slow so that you cut cleanly without tearing the copper. I will also edit the gcode file to get a deeper cut on the board outline. That will make it easy to simply break the bits off. I wont be using Levelling to be able to get even depth. My experience with the engraving has shown that very thin double sided tape glued directly to the alu bed works great. Even a tiny bubble in the tape shows up when you engrave small text. Discovered some of the pitfalls before even using a copper board. The isolation cuts converted into gcode use the diameter of your cutting tool to create the isolation, except that when the tool is small sharp and pointy. Then it wants to do multiple passes of the same section to get the width. Would take hours. So rigged the diameter of the tool with a command line switch -r 0.25 which made it only one pass. I can cut at any depth with the tool I use by setting it on the screen. Then it was repeating the radii on the pads as well, turned out the default for that was the same as the tool diameter. -F 0 fixed it, so that whatever radius is left over after a single cut is acceptable. The pic below is from NCViewer before I corrected the pad radius settings and you can clearly see the extra density corners where it spent a lot of time.