Friday, August 21, 2009

Using a LPKF PCB Mill


I operated a LPKF PCB mill for my first time last week.The board I made attaches to the back of my friend's AVR DB101 board. My board just adds an accelerometer to the unit.

The LPKF machines definitely have some bugs that need to be worked out. For example, you can see that the machine scrapes the copper when drawing the traces (picture 2). There were also some alignment issues that had to be worked out prior to milling it.

Although there were some bugs, if they were a little more affordable, I would buy a machine for myself. It definitely speeds up prototyping.
As you can see I made some mistakes and had to fix it using jumper wires.