I know, I know ... It's been a long time since my last update. However I wanted to share this one. I was contacted by my alma mater to help them mount a SMD hall effect device. Rather than ask me what would be best, they already ordered the part. It's unbelievably small. How small, 1.1mm square!

Yeah, have a look at what I milled out:

Even closer:


The whole board is about 1.5 inches. There are 2 surface mount capacitors in the bottom right. They are size 805 for those that care :D

I'll update when I actually mount the switch and test it. This is a BGA device (4 balls) ... I've never soldered a BGA but plan to use my hot air station. My other option is to buy a skillet from goodwill and do a reflow.

Jay

As usually happens my attention gets moved from robotics into some subset. IN this case, CNC has my full attention. Most of my adventures are posted at www.cnczone.com versus here. I also have been adding new videos to youtube. I was hoping to get involved with the students at my alma mater to get me back to robotics but it didn't work out.

Jay

Milling a printed circuit. I have been planning the time when I could mill my own circuits to save the hours of tedious point to point wiring I've done for some of my projects. While it didn't turn out as well as I hoped, I milled my first circuit tonight.



Jay

Update 8/14/2008

One on my goals is to be able to mill my own circuit boards. I done it using the toner transfer method and etching but I want to use the mill to do it. To do this I know I'll need a faster spindle than the one that is on my mill. So I recently purchased a high speed spindle from Wolfgang Engineering. But, I needed to make a mount for it.

Have a look at the process

Onward,
Jay

Update 7/19/2008:

Some testing of PCB-gcode on my mill. I added home switches. I mounted the Y axis one but am waiting for my extension kit from CNCFusion before mounting the X.

Anyway here is a short video of a test mill:


Jay

Updates July 16, 2008

I have posted some pictures of my mill in it's new home.



In addition, I am getting ready to start milling my own prototype PCBs. For this I have found a free ULP for Eagle CAD that converts the board drawing to Gcodes. It's called PCB-Gcode. In my excitement, I also decided to contribute some time to updating some C++ optimization code for PCB-Gcode output. It works very well as you can see in the sample images I uploaded to my Picasa album.

Now I'm working on a GUI interface using Qt. A small learning curve. More about milling PCBs can be found here.

Jay

A new project.


My son took immediate notice of this month's Nuts&Volts cover. Displayed are 3 LED lit name plates ... one being EVAN. "Daddy will you make Evan for me". I jumped at the chance/reason to get my CNC up and running. So I spent Saturday learning/re-learning how to use CAM, Mach3, and my CNC mini-mill.

I used a bamboo organizer box as the base/case and a piece of PVC for the top (that stuff is too useful IMHO). I am using 6 blue LEDS running off a 5 V 270mAh receiver pack (from my RC stash) drawing 20mA.

Of course this is just the beginning, he already want version 2 with blinking/fading lights and knobs and switches.

Edit, not too long after I decided to make some signs for a buddy's little girls. Rather than mill through, I back engraved the acrylic for a nice effect.

Jay