New member from Farnborough

[Doddy]

Evening all.
I have bought some professional cnc cut panels, and am looking to create many ancillary pieces for use throughout.
My first task is to see how viable it is to engrave some small pcb's, circuits containing 20 or so components. I have the files in Eagle and am hoping to compose Gcode within Mach3 to create these.
Regards Kev

Eagle ships with a PCB-GCode ulp which should be enough to feed directly into Mach3, assuming you mean to make the board with isolation-routing. My own experience with a cheap router wasn't particularly encouraging but you need to look at the capabilities of your own machine. There's two similar techniques - using V-engraving bits which requires a flat bed and little deflection on the spindle over the span of the X/Y axis (something than my Marchant Dice machine couldn't manage), or if you can't maintain an accurate height due to deflection then using micro-mills with straight-cutters in the order of 0.2-0.4mm dia - fragile as flip, and pricey, but they offer a better quality of cut. Best bet, use Eagle to export a design with some basic geometric shapes - maybe a square containing a circular path and try routing that on some cheap FR2 board (you'll probably want to use FR4 later, but for now FR2 will lessen your tool-wear, and is a bit cheaper whilst you're busy snapping bits). Work out how accurate and repeatable the machine can cut (maybe better to hand-craft some gcode for that) to understand how able the machine would be to route a PCB.

For panels, you might want to look at foamex and similar low-density board materials in the first instance and tentatively look at more rigid materials.