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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

> Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort

I don't know, for me, since I already had an entry-level 3D printer and Dremel, I was able to mod it to engrave the negative of a PCB onto these copper plates in a few days. Now I can get from design to finished PCB in an hour.

I suspect many people getting into EE might have some of these tools already, and being able to iterate quickly with locally-available supplies is a huge advantage, especially for people new to PCB design.

Edit: I would like to add that my method was rather poorly though out and the method in article is much better. Putting a Dremel on a 3D printer is not a good idea, it was just the first thing I came up with and it happened to work ok-ish for my very basic needs.

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Actually, PCB milling[1] is a thing. I suppose a MPCNC can be used for that. But it still has the huge drawback that you're limited to one layer if you're lazy (like me) or two if you fell like spending the time to add manual vias - though I was told there are tools for that, which work essentially like... Err... riveting pliers? (sorry, non native speaker)

Given that multi-layer PCBs are effectively laminations of individual boards, hobbyists have already made their own multilayer boards [1]. I don't see anything particular about milling as a means of copper removal that would stop you layering up boards?

[1] https://www.instructables.com/id/Flexible-Double-Layer-OR-Mu...

Thanks for the link, nice to know it can be done at the hobyyist-level. But it's still a lot of work I (personally) do not enjoy spending time with. If I had the space I'd probably setup my (hypothetical) MPCNC for milling PCBs, so I can do quick single layer prototypes (maybe some simple stacking using header rows), but anything more complex would still go to a fab.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board_millin... (derp, I forgot the link and can't edit anymore)

It's not a terrible idea, and I've wanted to play around with the concept myself, but I've never really had time or an acute need.

The Snapmaker (1) is a 3d printer with changeable heads. For mine I mostly use the 3d printing head or the low-power laser engraving head, but it also came with a milling head and they sell a higher-power laser head that can cut some materials.

I looked around and people have had trouble trying this with the milling head. The bit usually breaks and the X axis isn't stable enough. Maybe v2.0 will be more sable since it has a second Z axis mount.

That being said, their mounting platform is modular. There's nothing to stop you from fabricating a dremel mount and ripping apart an existing milling head to interface it with the dremel.

[1]: https://snapmaker.com/product

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