Belt-Driven Open Source Circuit Mill Using Low-Cost 3-D Printer Components

Abstract

Barriers to inventing electronic devices involve challenges of iterating electronic designs due to long lead times for professional circuit board milling or high costs of commercial milling machines. To overcome these barriers, this study provides open source (OS) designs for a low-cost circuit milling machine. First, design modifications for mechanical and electrical subsystems of the OS Distributed 3-D (D3D) Robotics prototyping system are provided. Next, Copper Carve, an OS custom graphical user interface, is developed to enable circuit board milling by implementing backlash and substrate distortion compensation. The performance of the OS D3D circuit mill is then quantified and validated for: positional accuracy, cut quality, feature accuracy, and distortion compensation. Finally, the return on investment is calculated for inventors using it. The results show by properly compensating for motion inaccuracies with Copper Carve, the machine achieves a motion resolution of 10 microns, which is more than adequate for most circuit designs. The mill is at least five times less expensive than all commercial alternatives and the material costs of the D3D mill are repaid from fabricating 20–43 boards. The results show that the OS circuit mill is of high-enough quality to enable rapid invention and distributed manufacturing of complex products containing custom electronics.

Economic savings for scientific free and open source technology: A review

“…the nano or uno). However, the number of labs with ready access to the skills necessary to design and fabricate a board are limited (although there are several open source PCB mills available for low costs [44] , [45] ). The standard deviation also tightened for these classes of open hardware devices to 9% and 10% for 3-D printed and Arduino-using projects, respectively.…”

Low-Cost Open Source Ultrasound-Sensing Based Navigational Support for the Visually Impaired

“…The distance modulation technique consists of splitting the entire four-meter measurement range into four bands as described in Section 2.4, and of implementing the non-linear duty cycle modulation for the most significant middle band of 35 cm to 150 cm. The system can be largely digitally manufactured including both the electronics and mechanical parts with conventional low-cost RepRap-class PCB milling [67] and 3-D printing. The system is quantified for range and accuracy to help visually-impaired people in distance measurement and obstacle avoidance including the minimal size of the object.…”

Partially RepRapable automated open source bag valve mask-based ventilator

“…The design of the device and software was governed by ISO standards [72] , the British Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s rapidly manufactured ventilator system [73] and the Key Ventilation Specifications developed by the E-Vent project [74] along with consultation with health care professionals. The system can be fabricated from readily accessible components, open source Arduino microcontrollers [75] , [76] open source electronics that can be made with open source mills [77] , [78] , [79] and custom parts with a RepRap-class material extrusion-based 3-D printer [80] , [81] , [82] , [83] , [84] . Mechanical ventilation, which can be easily controlled by a simple user input, was chosen to be most effective at treating the largest number of people.…”