That is awesome. I had a lot of frustration with both attempting to expose highly detailed PCB designs using photoresist, as well as my attempts to mill small traces on my CNC router. Would be great to be able to quickly create a PCB using an attachment for a CNC or 3d printer.
I love the design with the 3D box using the PCB material. How do you design them?! Are you just using old PCBs for the box, or is it also part of the PCB/electronics design? I built a similar direct PCB printer but it used CD drive stepper assemblies in an X/Y configuration. It took minutes to burn the designs :D Have you tried to use a projector? I think if you use a focusing lens, you can get enough resolution for quite cheap. And expose very fast.
I use freecad in combination with kicad, there is another video where you can see this. It does indeed take minutes to burn design. I have used projector's. Most popular in ldi is polygon mirror with paladin laser 365 nm. I believe my design should be able to outperform most projector's..
PCBway produced the PCBs. Minimum order quantity is 5 at a price of 25 USD. I have a thickness of 0.8 mm and 4 layers. There are several plugins for Kicad which can be used to generate the tracks.
I use a FPGA.. You could use a microcontroller but you need to guarantee that you can loop say at 2 MHZ. This was done via the beagle bone pru in assembly (see ldgraphy). I looked at ESP32 but it has many abstraction layers and typically uses RTOS. You would need to remove these which requires a deep understanding of the ESP32 and makes your code not portable.
@@Hexastorm That was the issue I ran into, even at 240MHz (cpu clock) the code would not run fast enough. I initially tried to circumvent processing interruptions by using RTOS and making one core perform pwm output while the other monitors trigger conditions. Even doing this did not work past, say, 20 frames per second without introducing significant jitter (+/- 3 degrees). Abysmal. So I just today bought a Raspberry Pi 4 B off of craigslist. Assembly is not something I have proficiency in but I will learn it.
@@lazarusmagellan2367 you don't need an adc.. a raspberry is too expensive.. I think you r are just starting too realize what the problem is . The algo is pretty basic.. a microcontroller can be cheaper but it will take you a long time if you r unfamiliar. For industrial solutions fpga prevail, as they provide a route to asic. Furthermore all the knowledge and time spent is hard to monetize, you are probably better off learning about time series and data science and fixing some boring business problem. You can buy a beaglebone and use ldgraphy or my beaglebone variant or the fpga. Fpga is cheapest and fastest ( current rate is 12 MHz). Interested in microcontroller solutions with a price below 5 Euro's.
@@Hexastorm I still don't really understand why my system doesn't work. I am essentially doing the same thing you are, just with a slightly simpler setup. I have an IR Led that reflects off of a mirror (polygon scanner) and onto a silicon photodiode (BPW 34). a void loop runs continuously polling an input pin, checking to see if the photodiode voltage is above the threshold value. if it is, then the laser is pulsed in a sequence of microseconds. Even with this incredibly basic code and setup, i cannot get a static image. The lines jiggle left and right and sometimes jitter >10 degrees off center. Yet when I check the photodiode and esp32 response times with an oscilloscope, nothing looks out of the ordinary. Hell, even a basic arduino should be able to do this without any problems. I just don't get it...
That is awesome. I had a lot of frustration with both attempting to expose highly detailed PCB designs using photoresist, as well as my attempts to mill small traces on my CNC router. Would be great to be able to quickly create a PCB using an attachment for a CNC or 3d printer.
Seriously clever use of the ferrite sheet. Nice work!
I love the design with the 3D box using the PCB material. How do you design them?! Are you just using old PCBs for the box, or is it also part of the PCB/electronics design? I built a similar direct PCB printer but it used CD drive stepper assemblies in an X/Y configuration. It took minutes to burn the designs :D
Have you tried to use a projector? I think if you use a focusing lens, you can get enough resolution for quite cheap. And expose very fast.
I use freecad in combination with kicad, there is another video where you can see this. It does indeed take minutes to burn design. I have used projector's. Most popular in ldi is polygon mirror with paladin laser 365 nm. I believe my design should be able to outperform most projector's..
Very interesting work.
Can you share how much it cost to make the pcb coils?
Did you do the design yourself?
PCBway produced the PCBs. Minimum order quantity is 5 at a price of 25 USD. I have a thickness of 0.8 mm and 4 layers. There are several plugins for Kicad which can be used to generate the tracks.
@@Hexastorm Thank you.
Is that 25 bucks a piece?
I read that they do up to 16 layers these days.
@@christopherd.winnan8701 no 5 bucks a piece
How do you trigger the laser consistently? I’m doing this with an esp32 and there is a lot of jitter. I can upload a video showing it
I use a FPGA.. You could use a microcontroller but you need to guarantee that you can loop say at 2 MHZ. This was done via the beagle bone pru in assembly (see ldgraphy).
I looked at ESP32 but it has many abstraction layers and typically uses RTOS. You would need to remove these which requires a deep understanding of the ESP32 and makes your code not portable.
@@Hexastorm That was the issue I ran into, even at 240MHz (cpu clock) the code would not run fast enough. I initially tried to circumvent processing interruptions by using RTOS and making one core perform pwm output while the other monitors trigger conditions. Even doing this did not work past, say, 20 frames per second without introducing significant jitter (+/- 3 degrees). Abysmal. So I just today bought a Raspberry Pi 4 B off of craigslist. Assembly is not something I have proficiency in but I will learn it.
@@Hexastorm I realized I need to use an adc, so I will just have to use Node MCU 32s as the ADC for the raspberry pi.
@@lazarusmagellan2367 you don't need an adc.. a raspberry is too expensive.. I think you r are just starting too realize what the problem is . The algo is pretty basic.. a microcontroller can be cheaper but it will take you a long time if you r unfamiliar. For industrial solutions fpga prevail, as they provide a route to asic. Furthermore all the knowledge and time spent is hard to monetize, you are probably better off learning about time series and data science and fixing some boring business problem. You can buy a beaglebone and use ldgraphy or my beaglebone variant or the fpga. Fpga is cheapest and fastest ( current rate is 12 MHz). Interested in microcontroller solutions with a price below 5 Euro's.
@@Hexastorm I still don't really understand why my system doesn't work. I am essentially doing the same thing you are, just with a slightly simpler setup. I have an IR Led that reflects off of a mirror (polygon scanner) and onto a silicon photodiode (BPW 34). a void loop runs continuously polling an input pin, checking to see if the photodiode voltage is above the threshold value. if it is, then the laser is pulsed in a sequence of microseconds. Even with this incredibly basic code and setup, i cannot get a static image. The lines jiggle left and right and sometimes jitter >10 degrees off center. Yet when I check the photodiode and esp32 response times with an oscilloscope, nothing looks out of the ordinary. Hell, even a basic arduino should be able to do this without any problems. I just don't get it...
Do you build these for sale?
I plan to 🙂... hopefully I can sell them in Q3 or Q4