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> Yeah but neither will a multi-axis robot that can etch and drill and pick and place and solder. So simplify: mill instead of etching, which also handles dril
by naasking 4y ago
> Yeah but neither will a multi-axis robot that can etch and drill and pick and place and solder.
So simplify: mill instead of etching, which also handles drilling. This needs 3-axis movement, which is all you need to drop solder paste on pads and do pick and place too, you just need a tool changer for each task. Not a trivial project either, but it's been done and certainly not for an absolute fortune.
Final step is reflow soldering, and this can be done using just a heated plate [1]. This all seems doable for most hobby sized PCBs.
[1] https://www.solderreflowplate.co.uk/ https://www.solderreflowplate.co.uk/
- xyzzy123 4y agoYes; milling is fiddly but because the forces are so low (and you can reduce the mechanical accuracy needed with depth probing), it's possible to do reliable pcb milling for similar to cost of decent fdm printer. People are doing this today but everything is jank, nobody's repackaged it with prusa-like reliability at hobbyist prices AFAIK. Ideally if you could get v thin copperclad with a substrate that doesn't produce toxic dust, with the right software and jigs you could produce "basic" multilayer boards(1) with 1 "pin aligned" flip and a few manual tool changes for drilling etc. It all seems possible today but has never been packaged nicely and made cheap, I suspect because the market is not big enough. (1) one big issue... the boards produced would be vastly inferior to "real" multilayer boards, would mainly be usable at low frequency, you could get complex layout / routing but they'd suck at high frequency and in several other ways. You would need to relayout / redesign to target a "real" process, which is somewhat undesirable for prototyping.