5. Electronics production

One of the main purposes of our group work was to check actual offset value of driling. It was similar to week 4. Knowing actual offsset value is important because the value relevarent to the designed sizes of path on the PCB boards. Moreover, we should learn how to use the driling machine by the correct procedures.

First of all, we downloaded the subject PNG file to dril from the instructor’s web page.

The PNG file was set and inported to the computer connected to the driling machine. The computer has a special software, called “Fabmodule”, to set parameters for driling, so we used it.

The correct procedures tot use the driling machine in Fabalab Kannai are following ways.

• Remove four screws attached at four corners and dispatch the base.
• Press “View” to let movable part move to desired positions.
• On the Fabmodule, set x0 and y0 position (zo shoule be 0) and press “move to xyz0”.
• Set dril on the movable part.
• By pressing “UP” and “Down” bottons, move the dril along z axis direction.
• Loosen a screw attached to the dril and let the drill bit touch the base.
• Screw again.

Sometimes the Internet connection is show down and we could not work. In that case, we should open terminal display and type “cd fabmodule” and “npm start”.

After completing setting hardwares, we set parameters to drill.
First of all, we set cut_depth by “0.4” and the product was shown below picture.
However, it looked like that there were still areas that could not be drilled perfectly. From this result, We assumed the base might tilt a little. Then, we put board at center of the base and tried again. The result was shown like this

It sounded great ! So, we used this product to measure differences between actual and designed path sizes. From the results of measuring, we defined the value of offset was 0.2 mm. Parameters to drill are shown below.

group assignment:
characterize the design rules for your PCB production process