In this episode I'm gonna take my Sienci Labs Mill one and convert it into a
circuit board cutter I'll show you all the steps I did to make this to add it
to my electronics workbench to give me a complete set up. This episode is brought
to you by the generous donations of my patreon supporters. The Sienci Mill One has
this plastic base that's what you work from it and you can clamp your material
or double side stick tape to it I just clamped a piece of wood for my very
first project and then they decided to use that same piece of wood and make it
more permanent so I cut it to the exact same size of that plastic base and then
I use the Sienci Mill One to drill a hole in each corner all the way through
through the wood and into the plastic and then I used a one and a half inch
quarter-twenty bolt put that through the hole and then a nut underneath and then
tightened this guy up and I did this at all four corners so I just use a wrench
and a ratchet and tighten this guy down until the head of the bolt was exactly
flush with the top of the wood now I did crush the wood a little bit in the
corner but it really doesn't matter I made it so as flush and now I needed to
cut a perfectly flat surface so I went to easel brought in this block and set
it to a two millimeter cut with a complete fill and then I let it just
router this guy out so I knew I'd have a perfectly flat base in order to cut my
circuit boards and here is a circuit board it's a one sided it's got copper on
one side and a like a fiberglass material on the other so I just want to
cut through just the top layer that copper to form my circuit board so I
used double-sided sticky tape on the back and stuck it down to that flat area
now for the circuit board I like to use Express PCB this is a software I use
they've got a plus version I use the classic version it's been around for
over 20 years I'm so familiar with it but it doesn't output Gerber files
directly you can get them if you join their membership or buy it separately
but that's after you order a board so I wanted to see if I could just screen
capture a board layout so here's a simple board layout that I had created
and I just screen captured that circuit as an individual image and then I went
to easel to see if this would work to imported it as an image to trace.
So I imported that image and then I set the threshold very low and it
looked great this is what I was looking for so then I did trace outline and I
got the outlines of what I wanted to cut so this was looking really good and here
it is imported in Easel now I had to resize this to the exact size it didn't
do that but I set it to a point nine millimeter depth of cut very very fine
and then on the inside and then for the holes I did those as a fill so we just
cut out an area I'm gonna drill these holes later on my drill press so I just
needed a marker so once I had that set I generated a preview and look at you can
see it's cutting out the copper islands it's exactly what I wanted
I made a Z probe with my meter I clipped to the bolt and then to the bit and I
lowered it until the meter told me they were just touching and then I was ready
to send the file. I let the Easel software control the Sienci Mill One and I
could see right away this thing was cutting perfectly I had the height set
just right it took a couple passes around and made a perfect little island
so I just let this thing continue to cut and here's kind of a time-lapse it cut
it so perfectly even because I had milled that board I was really happy
with the results I was getting and here are the results you can see if you look
real close they cut through that copper perfectly there were no bridges no
shorts this thing worked great so now I just needed to drill the holes now I
could have done that with the mill but it's just as easy to do it on my drill
press and because I gouged out those holes the bit just fell right into place
and after I was done with this I had my board ready to be soldered together but
before that I wanted to cut it out to the actual size so I went to the bandsaw
and this stuff cuts pretty easy on my bandsaw so I cut out along those
edges that the Sienci Mill One had cut to tell me the size of the board and
there's the result actual size and the final step insert the components bend
over the leads and solder them all in place
this is bare copper by I had sanded the board so I was getting really good flow
because the channels were cut good I was getting no shorts or bridging and once I
applied power it started working this is a flashing back and forth train crossing
type circuit so it worked perfectly now I have a complete electronics work area
from design solder and test area to 3d print design and printing to the CNC
circuit board cutter and bezels if I wanted along with the components and
test equipment from one end to the other and back again I have a complete
electronics prototype lab right here in my workshop. If you want to see more
projects like this let me know in the comments below if you want to check out
some of the other projects check out these videos that are popping up if you
want to help support the channel a dollar-a-month the patreon and if
nothing else click on that CHEP logo and subscribe that's it I'll see you next
time