[zakqwy]

I designed and fabricated a weird 3D printed 4-axis CNC machine (in ~3 months, oof) which uses carbide inserts to carve tiny isolation routes in chunks of PCB substrate. It's very much a finicky proof-of-concept, and may very well host fatal hidden gremlins which doom the project to novelty status, but with a bit of care I can produce boards with 6/6 design rules (0.15 mm spaces and traces) at 20-30 mm/s, roughly an order of magnitude faster than a desktop mill with significantly less noise.

I gave a talk this weekend on the machine at the eighth Hackaday Supercon, which will be on YouTube at some point, but for now here is a link to the project page, including design files and a few dozen hasty project logs.

[buescher]

Oh that’s so cool. I love the ribbons of copper curling up. Might be ok for use cases like prototyping antennas - one place I’d still use a pcb mill for the the turnaround time. How is it at removing larger areas of copper?

[zakqwy]

It's probably not excellent; the grooves are V-shaped and the machine isn't stiff enough to go very deep, so you'd need to take a lot of passes. But a crosshatch toolpath might pull up extra copper on the sides and make fills quickly. I'll run some tests when I'm back home and report back! Would be neat to be able to prototype RF trace circuits same-day.