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

John,
I too looked at your site, very interesting. We ran a 1/4-20 stepper drive shaft with low cost bearings in our lab for years. It became obsolete way before we had mechanical problems, and was a whole lot less money and faster to build than the ACME thread approach. We figured if it broke down, we could fix it with hardware store parts, rather than pay $$$$ for overnight shipping. We kept spare steppers, and controllers in a cabinet under the testing bay, and never used any of them. Simple is key.

Group,
What do people use for software to run a homebrew pcb milling machine? I used to have a LPKF in the lab, but the software for it was so poor, we ended up going back to outsourcing prototypes. This was about 10 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed.

Most everything I've seen deals with regular G code etc, which is fine for model making, but I've been unable to find a program that would ideally take gerber or excellon to a motor controller, or at a minimum convert gerber/excellon to gcode. Although I can generate dxf from my pcb program, I'd rather create the protos off of gerber to minimize any problems. I've had it happen where in the photo method (2X or 4X laser print photographically reduced to 1X to a negative) creates a great prototype board, yet the gerber when sent out to a board house created some real headaches.

Thanks
Ron

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