PCB Engraving
Printed Circuit Boards will make your circuits more compact, reliable and durable. The process is to create a board that is an insulator with paths of copper conductor that are cut into a pattern that makes up your circuit. One way to do this is to start with a board that is fully coated with copper conductor and cut away the copper to produce a circuit pattern with what remains.
It is possible for one to produce high qulaity PCBs using the Bantam tools CNC machines. This lesson will begin as a collection of links to software tools and website tutorials to get you started.
Designing your Circuit
We need a CAD based tool to develop our circuit. The circuit begins as a collection of components wired together or on a breadboard. The software produces the schematic diagram and a layout of your circuit pattern, You can adjust and optimize the pattern to your needs and see it on the screen before you produce it. The software then produces a file that is used by the CNC machine to cut the pattern.
CAD tools for Circuits
EAGLE is the professional tool and it is part of Fusion 360. If you need a professional account on Fusion 360 Rolling Robots has a few paid licenses ask DK for access. Here is a tutorial on EAGLE.
A somewhat simpler tool is Fritzing. Fritzing is a tool for developing your circuits and can do everything we need for simple circuits. It is kind of shareware where you pay just $10 to use it forever. Rolling robots has a paid account for this ask DK for the password to download.
Fritzing will produce a Gerber file but the CNC needs g-code so there are tools to convert. One free one is FlatCAM.