Cutting PCB’s - recommendations, tools etc

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Originally Posted by Fivetide

booski , when you say a simple probe what do you mean ? What do you attach the other end of the croc clip to ? I couldnt see any notes on actually setting up the hardware on the site .

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The cutting booski refers to is achieving a constant depth (thereby catering for bulges & valleys on your copper board as it isolates your pcb tracks)...that's what autolevellers do.

i use CNC-USB (which has autolevelling built in), but there are other flavours out & about (indeed there was a thread discussing one that a memeber here had done a week or two ago)

Yeah, pretty much. I just tape a piece of wire to the board with a bit of tape and then a croc clip to my spindle. The software then probes the height of the board.

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Originally Posted by booski

Yeah, pretty much. I just tape a piece of wire to the board with a bit of tape and then a croc clip to my spindle. The software then probes the height of the board.

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How does the feedback of the tip and croc clip get back to the computer ?

Well, I have a simple parallel port chinese TB6560 controller and I use one of the input pins on the controller setup in LinuxCNC as a probe. There are 5 input pins on my controller and 1 common, so with a lead connected to the common and another connected to the input.

With the probe attached to the tool, the Z axis comes down and when the tool makes contact with the board, it measures the height and adjusts the rest of the g-code to suit the board at that point.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by booski

Well, I have a simple parallel port chinese TB6560 controller and I use one of the input pins on the controller setup in LinuxCNC as a probe. There are 5 input pins on my controller and 1 common, so with a lead connected to the common and another connected to the input.

With the probe attached to the tool, the Z axis comes down and when the tool makes contact with the board, it measures the height and adjusts the rest of the g-code to suit the board at that point.

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which is fine until you forget to remove the croc clip before cutting :) . Also a solid tool rather than a sprung 'plunger' means the Z-travel, and therefore the mapping speed, has to be much slower to avoid damaging the copper surface... but it works....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by booski

Well, I have a simple parallel port chinese TB6560 controller and I use one of the input pins on the controller setup in LinuxCNC as a probe. There are 5 input pins on my controller and 1 common, so with a lead connected to the common and another connected to the input.

With the probe attached to the tool, the Z axis comes down and when the tool makes contact with the board, it measures the height and adjusts the rest of the g-code to suit the board at that point.

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Is there any setup instructions for the probe ?

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Originally Posted by irving2008

which is fine until you forget to remove the croc clip before cutting :) . Also a solid tool rather than a sprung 'plunger' means the Z-travel, and therefore the mapping speed, has to be much slower to avoid damaging the copper surface... but it works....

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Haha, yeah, must remember to remove the probe.
Fortunately, my DIY spindle motor has pillars holding the motor and so is directly connected to the tool so I haven't got to worry about removing the croc clip.

The autoleveller software if I remember correctly allows you to set the probing speed which default is 100mm/m I think so it's very slow and the machine reacts quick enough that it doesn't damage the board. Similarly, I set the retract height to 1mm so that it retracts quickly and moves to the next point quicker. Could even set it to much less than that really for quick probing.