Homebrew PCBs

Thanks Ballendo,

I understand now that my problem definitely will be the software, not the 
hardware..
I guess you meant it to sound easy but it is all a bit intimidating.

I want this thing as a help, for making faster and more precise smd boards.
If the building (and especially software stuff) gets more complicated and 
time demanding
than applying the paste by hand it is not really a good idea.

I'm not a software guy. I hate fiddling with software to get things going. 
I'd rater
apply solder paste 10 hours by hand than trying to get software to work 
for 10 hours.

How long would you estimate it takes to get all the software going?

How long would it take to get the drilling software running if my layout 
software produces
excellon drill files?
Is this possible with free software only?

How long would it take to get the software running, and roughly adjusted 
for solder paste
dispensing.
Assume a rx274 file as a output with different size "dots" for different 
paste amounts in the
right places.

I know this is nearly impossible to estimate but i need to know if it is 
like
"oh yes, that would be simple, i know how i would solve that" or "that's 
tough, nobody
has tried this before".

Which software would i need for solder paste dispensing, is it possible 
with free software?

If possible i would like to download software first, have a look at it 
etc. I don't want
to build the machine and then the whole thing fails because of software 
problems.


thanks a lot for the other hints, i agree on the mechanical things.

The software thing is really intimidating for me, the question is not if i 
can solve
such problems but more if i want to spend a lot of time with it.


ST


On Sun, 25 Apr 2004 11:07:19 -0000, ballendo <ballendo@...> wrote:

> Stefan,
>
> If your cnc machine was set up as Dave suggests, you'd use a couple
> of its "normal" features to make this easy: