What still needs to be done to get the PCB mill back up and running

Electronics
1

I have a need for some basic PCB milling. What is the current status and what is still needed to be done to get this machine back up?

@artg_dms
@Lampy

2

I think @Lampy and his son were the last to work on it. Last time I checked it still needed some kind of interface and control boards. Not sure what sftrwr is on the pc. or what the interface is. Was planning on contacting @william_petefish to find out what it had.

3

@Kentamanos I have seen you use this machine in the past. Do you remember what the controller was that it used?

@artg_dms @Lampy Do you’ll know if this needs a power supply as well?

4

Here’s the link to the machine: TransIP - Reserved domain

There’s a picture on there of the driver, but I couldn’t find details: TransIP - Reserved domain

Perhaps they sell replacements? Would probably be cheaper than Gecko drivers etc.

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5

Thanks Ken.

Do we know what happened to the PC with the parallel port that was running this? As far as I know a PC with either MACH3 or EMC2 was never in the Electronics room with this machine before the thief stripped its parts.

Screenshot from 2016-10-11 09-09-47.png1920Ă—1080 642 KB

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It was in the dark corner.

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Do you know if it is still in Electronics or was it taken by the thief?

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I have sent the company, that Kent linked to above, a request for a quote on the replacement cost for the controller box. Will let you’ll know when/if I get a response.

9

It was definitely LinuxCNC (AKA EMC2).

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10

Just further FWIW if you hopefully get to the point of needing a Gerber/Drill file based CAM:

For “CAM” operations, I typically used “pcb2gcode”, a command line tool that I think is available via apt-get on Ubuntu etc. Apparently the project lives here: GitHub - pcb2gcode/pcb2gcode: Command-line tool for isolation, routing and drilling of PCBs and there is “an experimental” GUI version of it here: GitHub - pcb2gcode/pcb2gcodeGUI: GUI for pcb2gcode

I don’t know if I ever actually ran any G-Code out of it (I think I just ran some stuff “high”), but this looked VERY nice: http://flatcam.org/. Its website makes it look old (a year since last “news”), but the project seems to be updated fairly regularly: Bitbucket

If you’re using Eagle, there’s something called pcb-gcode that I know @mrcity has run before (seems to be here: http://www.pcbgcode.org/).

2 Likes
11

Should still be in the corner along with new collections of other PCs.

1 Like