Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

Hi guys,

About a year ago or so there was some talk of using EDM for
isolation milling and such. Stefan was tinkering a bit with it and
another fellow did some heavy, indepth work in the process,
including making a power supply to do the grunt work.

I remember the initial approach was to use a bitmap image for
processing of the machining. There was a good reason why this
approach was used and I don't recall why - does anyone remember?

Last night I was giving thought to this process. The one problem I
see with EDM and isolation milling is keeping the PCB conductive.
For example, if the output from the isolation milling routine
creates and island in the middle of the board - then further
machining needs to be done in that island area, it would no longer
be conductive. So I suspect that is part of the problem with using
vector data as opposed to bitmap data.

Chris