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PCB Plotter a.k.a. Direct Ink To PCB

The simples method to manufacturing PCBs at home is the toner trasfer method.But the laser printer is the most important a part of this technic and the laser printer is expensive stuff for only printing some PCB / month.

The cheapest method to manufacturing PCBs at home is using alcoholic pen and drawing the traces with your own hands . But our hands resolution or the precision is not enough in most case.
The PCB plotter machine with CNC controlling are the solution of this problem.
I spend my last weeks to build this PCB plotter machine from 2 CDROM driver and a floppy driver.

The parameters:


  • 38mm*38mm Workspace (enough in most case)
  • 0.0735 mm / steep (in halfsteeping mode)

Parts that is used:

  • As I said  : 2 CDROM and 1 Floppy driver
  • 3 * L293 Dual Full Bridge Motor Driver IC
  • Power supply of course
  • ATMEGA88 and USB2Serial bridge
  • Some wires and pin headers
The full cost is about 15$!!

The manufacturing flow


I using Eagle Cad for design the circuits and of course I using GERBER_RS274X format for CAM processing.
I wrote a small python script for communicating with the plotter driver (atmega88).This little script is converting inch metrics to stepper motor step format and sending this values over serial port.

The plotter itself and the driver on the left side






On the next video I show the machine in action.(I had some issue with the autofocus.Sorry.)
Drawint the traces.

Boxing




I get an old VPN824 router box and put it all together.The PCBs that you can see on the second picture was made by this machineYou can see the serial port header and the indicator LED on the front of the box.
Ready to work.

Inside the box:Controller board ,Motor driver board and Power supply
More pictures HERE.

You can find the sources on my GITHUB.



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Comments

  1. vhafuwiFebruary 26, 2018 at 1:10 AM

    Hi, any chance of increasing the work area , or use different stepper motors

    ReplyDelete
  2. zoon81February 26, 2018 at 2:37 AM

    Hi,
    This is build out of thing which is laying around my house, so if you want to build one with a bigger working area, this is not your way :)
    Get a 3d printer. You can plot with it :)

    ReplyDelete

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