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Upcoming Events
- Events on June 20, 2013
Open Evening
From: 7:30 pm
to 11:00 pm
Description: We'll be open for the evening. Feel free to pop in and see what we're about.
- Events on June 25, 2013
Brighton Pi meetup
From: 7:00 pm
to 10:00 pm
Description: Monthly meetup of the Brighton Raspberry Pi user group, featuring guest speakers, show and tells, and Pi-based workshops.
See the Brighton Pi mailing list for more info: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/brightonpi - Events on June 27, 2013
Open Evening
From: 7:30 pm
to 11:00 pm
Description: We'll be open for the evening. Feel free to pop in and see what we're about.
We are here
Build Brighton
Rodhus Studios (back entrance)
Freehold Terrace
Brighton
BN2 4AB
Author Archives: Chris Holden
Parsing Inkscape SVG files to create g-code
Here’s a screenshot of our first test – and it’s all looking rather encouraging!I actually got the generate g-code (after parsing the SVG file and applying modifiers) to match the positioning of the objects in Inkscape – in the example above, you can s… Continue reading
Making NC drill files and GCode from a PDF (via Inkscape)
Mach3 is a serious bit of kit. There are options and settings for everything!Which a lot of people would be really pleased with. Just like Eagle is the de-rigueur PCB layout software, because it’s so configurable. But here at Nerd Towers, we’re no… Continue reading
Manufacturing PCBs at home
A while back we started looking at the feasibility of manufacturing at home. The reasons are many, but that’s a discussion for another day. So far, we’ve been looking at how to screen print double-sided pcbs before immersing in ferric chloride for etching.
Now double-sided boards mean finding a way of lining up the prints on both sides of a board. And the most obvious way to do this is to pre-drill the boards before printing. Which in turn means using a CNC machine.
We built a CNC drilling machine for under £50 last year which was pretty accurate – up to about 0.5mm which still made for some pretty useable PCBs. One idea (which we’re not dismissing – just haven’t time to implement just yet) is to add a camera to the drill head and drill a pre-printed (but not-yet-etched) board. The drill head can move into position, then we use the image from the camera to ensure the drill goes exactly into the centre of each hole by jogging the x/y axis a little until perfectly lined up. This should at least remove the 0.5mm inaccuracies we got during testing. With one side printed and the board drilled, we could then line up the board and print the second side before etching the entire thing.
But just right at this minute, we’ve not really got time to do more development – especially not when we’ve a 0.1mm accurate CNC milling machine gathering dust under a table somewhere….
It’s been a few years since this thing was fired up, and it was supplied with RoutoutCNC software (incidentally, this is now being given away with free licences since it’s no longer supported) but we couldn’t get it to work properly. Each time the x-axis moved, the z-axis travelled downwards about once every 10 steps.
Mach3, however, worked just fine (once we’d spent a few hours setting it up and replacing the 25-pin serial cable we thought was a parallel one with a proper, straight-through parallel cable). Here’s the CNC in jog mode.
The CNC machine has been made for milling. It’s a sturdy, chunky beast and uses really good quality lead screws on each axis. So it’s pretty accurate and has very good repeatability. The only thing is – it’s so sloooowww.
It’ll have to do for now. Maybe hacking our own mini drill machine in future isn’t such a bad idea after all!
Viewer: M72DXDU-8X5TQ6L-KPVADQT-9EK0DUD
Manager: L4CD9XT-DK5P5PK-TKHA2AK-D7WRCGC
Magentic bearings
Last night’s BuildBrighton Open Evening was a pretty busy affair, and there were some pretty cool projects being worked on. We particularly liked James’s Magnetic Bearings idea – especially since he’s coupled it with solar panels, to generate the elect… Continue reading
PSoC4 Pioneer Kit from Farnell
Here’s an interesting little development board, recommended to us by Jason from BuildBrighton. It’s an ARM-based dev board, from those cool kids at Farnell, called the PSoC4 Pioneer Kit (or the CY8CKIT-042 for you part-number junkies). It’s an Arduino sized/shaped dev board, is Arduino shield-compatible but with an ARM processor and costs just £16+VAT!
It comes in a lovely fatter-than-usual DVD case, with mini usb lead and – bizarrely – about four or five little jump leads in a bag. Software is downloadable from http://www.cypress.com/go/cy8ckit-042
What’s really exciting is that the processor alone is available for an amazing £1.58 each (in multiples of ten). That’s almost as cheap as even the lowest 8-bit PIC microcontroller we use – and much cheaper than the 18F2455 chips we’re so keen on using for their USB capabilities.
But it’s not just a souped-up usb-capable PIC…. it has up to 6 FPGA modules – meaning you can program what the hardware peripherals actually do: need 6 uart/serial ports on your next device? No problem!
What got us talking about these was CNC Paul’s need for a number of quadrature encoders for servo-motor drives on his CNC design. We’re still not 100% sure why these are so much more awesome than stepper motors, but he’s insistent that servo motors are the way to go and that steppers are just sooooo last year. Which means we need to be able to drive the things which means decoding super-fast high-speed quadrature encoded signals.
So far we’ve only seen the introductory video, but it was enough to encourage us to buy three of these little beauties – one for me, one for Steve, and one for CNC Paul (Jason already has one, and has a couple of days development head-start on the rest of us!)
The software is already in our download queue and hopefully we’ll get a few hours spare to play with it tomorrow and see what the examples are like….
PCB routing at BuildBrighton
They say all the best things come in little packages. I’m not convinced, by yesterday a tiny little parcel arrived, and it was indeed pretty exciting. It was a range of v-shaped cutting bits for cnc routing:They are made with a 3.2mm shank (ideal for D… Continue reading
BuildBrighton has a new CNC router
While there’s not been much activity on the blog for the last few weeks, things have been pretty busy elsewhere. Firstly, we’re looking at the feasibility of manufacturing locally and getting more people and businesses involved; so rather than sending … Continue reading
Messing about with 7 segment displays and a PIC 16F628a
I scored a load of cheap 4-way 7-segment displays off eBay the other day. They worked out at about 30p each so I got 20 and stuffed them in a drawer. Then I thought that perhaps it’d be nice to get one working, just so that we know what to do with them… Continue reading
More crazy Farnell packaging
We love Farnell here at Nerd Towers – pop onto their website click around a bit and the next morning, a parcel arrives with all your lovely goodies. Sometimes you can leave it as late at 7pm and your stuff still arrives the next day! But sometimes thei… Continue reading
Artwork for screen printing PCBs
Since we got back from Berlin (after a two-day drive on each leg of the journey, and a total of 1,500 miles there and back) we’ve been giving lots of thought to silkscreen printing for making lots of PCBs.We’ve gone back-and-forth with numerous designs… Continue reading