On 04/03/2008, James Newton <jamesnewton@massmind.org> wrote:

[...]
>  Going to a board house
>  and paying for the boards to be made WILL cost less, unless you plan on
>  going into small scale production.

The problem with a board house is the time of delivery. For a small
scale PCB (around 5*10 cm), Olimex in Bulgaria takes around $50
including shipping, and the delivery time is abour 3-4 weeks (this is
first-hand facts from a friend of mine, although i'm not entirely sure
of the area of his board). This is $50 and 4 weeks too much,
especially if I need a prototype board yesterday.

If this project will cost me a lot I will probably not mind much. The
biggest outdeal is that I will have the opportunity to think, and be
creative. I value these assets way bigger than money and time. If I'm
not able to think, create, analyze or anything like that, my brain
goes stagnant and I turn out extremely dull and bored. That's how I am
as a person, and I'm aware it's questionable but there's nothing I can
do about it.

>  Why on earth would you convert the vector PCB layout to a raster PNG and
>  then back to a vector in the driver? Just use any of the available (some
>  free) mill software (TurboCNC for example) to read and run the Gerbers from
>  the PCB software.

Well, that idea was the first one that popped my mind. As I wrote in
the OP, I have zero knowledge of CNC. This includes zero knowledge of
gerbers and anything that follows it. The idea was in no way
unrefineable, meaning I will absolutely not mind reading up about
better solutions. I have heard EagleCAD (Which I'm using) can do
"outlining" on tracks and output the result to gerbers, so this is
probably the way to go.

But this will be one of the last steps, first I will reread Tony's
post about motors a couple of more times and start playing off with
these.


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- Rikard - http://bos.hack.org/cv/
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