Milling PCBs: Fritzing, FlatCAM, and Carvey

I have a new superpower of making PCBs! Here are my steps, worked out over several boards of my own and my students. The project here is one my students did using an Adafruit Pro-Trinket 5V to program 5 LEDs and a button. (I now know we could have used an ATtiny84 to control the LEDs but I'm just starting to learn how to use them.) Here are a few finished projects.

Fritzing

I'll probably learn Eagle someday but for now all I can handle and teach my high school students is breadboarding to PCB design in Fritzing.

Some things I learned along the way through this process:

• Single side only, make sure everything is on top or bottom layer, one or the other.
• Make all traces extra thick (48 mil).
• To add jumpers, add a bendpoint on either side of the gap, delete the middle trace, and drag the orphaned traces to the jumper. Then drag the jumper where you want it. You can resize a jumper if you get the mouse in the right place, somewhere on the blue but hard to find.
• Command + click + drag to move bendpoints more precisely without snapping to grid.
• I could only get FlatCAM to cut rectangular board outlines so don't bother with non-rectangular outlines unless you can figure out how FlatCAM can do other shapes.
• Any component with more than 2 legs/pins must be moved to the other side from the traces as you are looking at the bottom of your board and any DIPs or microcontrollers or transistors or whatever will be on the other side. If you don't do this they will be backward and circuits will be wrong.

Once designed, export to Extended Gerber.

FlatCAM

With FlatCAM you take your Gerber files and create gcode instructions Carvey can use. Beware, I got FlatCAM working on my Mac with much command line hassle but wasted a class trying to get my students through it. They had too many varied problems and idiosyncratic issues to solve. It's a bunch of Python files and dependencies on Mac. On PC you can just get an installer and it just works, so that's what I ended up doing, having students work through it one-at-a-time at the PC connected to the Carvey. I owe everything to this Inventables forum post, which details the process wonderfully. But here are my modifications:

First, change your units to mm by clicking the Options tab, switch to Project Options, and selecting mm, then go back to the Projects tab.

Click File > Open Gerber and open the file in your folder with “copperTop.gtl” in it.

Select your copperTop.gtl file in the Project panel.
Click the Selected tab.
Scroll down to the Offset section.
Type in the value 25.4 for the x and y offset, and click the Offset button.
We have to do this to move the milling area away from the Carvey’s Smart Clamp at the lower left of the machine. 25.4 mm = 1 inch and with any smaller margin the Carvey won't accept the gcode file.

Your PCB has moved off the screen, but click the recenter button to view it again.

Isolation Routing

Scroll back up to the Isolation Routing section and change the Tool diameter to 0.3. Leave the rest and click Generate Geometry. We are using a 0.2 mm V shaped engraving bit for this step but a 0.3 mm diameter setting will give the traces a little more room.

Your traces will get a red border.

Go back to the Projects tab and you’ll see a new file with a .gtl_iso extension. Select that file and click Selected.
Type in the following settings:

Cut Z: -0.1
Travel Z: 1
Feed Rate: 254.0
Tool Diameter: 0.3

Click Generate.

Now a blue outline should appear around your traces.

Now back to the Project tab. Select the new file with cnc at the end and click Selected. At the bottom click the Export G-Code button.

Name this file “iso_2mmPASS1.gcode”. ISO stands for isolation as in this pass we are doing the trace isolation routing with a 0.2 mm milling bit.
Whew, the first of your gcode files is done!

We need a 2nd, wider pass, and then a 3rd. Go back to the Project tab, click the copperTop.gtl_iso file again, click Selected, and change the tool diameter to 0.5.
Click Generate. The blue lines will get thicker.

Go back to the Projects tab, click the new gtl_iso_cnc_1 file, click Selected, then scroll down to Export G-Code. Name this file “iso_2mmPASS2.gcode”.

3rd time, go back to Projects, click copperTop.gtl_iso, click Selected, change the tool diameter to 0.7.
Click Generate. Again, the blue lines will get thicker.
Back in Projects, click the new gtl_iso_cnc_2, click Selected, scroll down, click Export G-Code, and name this file “iso_2mmPASS3.gcode”.

Non-Copper Area

Next we create gcode for the area outside of the traces, called the "paint area."
Go back to the Project panel, all the way back to the top and select the file with "copperTop.gtl" in it, and click Selected. 

Scroll down to the Non-copper Areas section and set the Boundary Margin to 3.3, then click Generate Geometry.

Go back to the Project panel and select the last entry that ends with .gtl_noncopper, and click select.

Scroll down to the Paint Area section and input the following:

1.58 for the Tool diameter, which corresponds with the Carvey 1/16" flat milling bit.

0.15 for the Overlap

0.25 for the Margin

Click Generate, and you will be asked to click the area to cover, so click in an area of the board but NOT on a trace. Red toolpaths will be drawn in the non-copper areas.

Now go back to the Project panel and click the new entry with "gtl.noncopper_paint" at the end, and click Selected. Under Create CNC Job, enter the following:

Cut Z: -0.05

Travel Z: 1

Feed Rate: 230

Tool dia: 1.58

Now click Generate and you will see the red toolpaths fill in with blue.

Now back in the Project panel select the file ending in "gtl.noncopper_paint_cnc" and click Selected. Click Export G-Code down at the bottom and save the file as "paint158.gcode".

Drill Files 

Go back to the Project tab. Click File > Open Excellon and select the file in your folder with “drill” in the name, and open it. You will see some red circles added to your layout.

First we need to offset the drill holes like you did for the trace isolations. Select the drill file in the Project panel, click Selected, and scroll down to the Offset section. Type in the same x and y offset as before (25.4,25.4) and click offset.
Now your holes should line up with the traces.

So these are the drilling bits for the Carvey, ordered from Inventables, from left to right:
1.2mm = purple
1.1mm = maroon
1.0mm = dark green
0.80mm = blue
0.90mm = goldenrod
0.70mm = yellow
0.60mm = red
0.50mm = green
0.40mm = white
0.30mm = orange
Different components in your PCB need different sized holes drilled for them, so we will be making two different gcode files, each one for a specific bit size. To simplify the job we will make one file for the 0.9mm bit, and one for the 1.0mm bit.

Scroll back up to the top of this panel. It should say Excellon Object at the top. Hold Ctrl and click the two top drill diameters in the Tools list, so they are both highlighted.

Add the following settings for this drill size:
Cut Z: -2
Travel Z: 1
Feed rate: 45.0

And click Generate.

Go back to the Project panel, select the drill.txt_cnc file, click Selected, scroll down and click Export G-Code. Give it a file name that specifies the drill bit size you will use for that file, like mine on the left.

To make the second drill file, go back and select the drill.txt file, click Selected, now hold Ctrl while you select the larger two diameter bits. Keep the same settings for this CNC job.
Click Generate.
Back in the Project panel you will see a file with drill.txt_cnc_1. Select it, click Selected, and click Export G-Code.
Name this file drill_1mm.gcode

Last Gcode File! Your Board Outline

Back to the Project tab. Click File > Open Gerber, and select your file with the word contour in it. You will see a green outline added to your layout.

Once again, you need to add the 25.4 mm offset. Click the contour file, click Selected, scroll down to Offset, and put in (25.4,25.4). Click Offset. You should see your board shape match up with your layout.

Now scroll up to the section in the panel Board cutout. Enter the following:
Tool dia: 1.58
Margin: 0.1
Gap size: 0.5
Gaps: (leave 4 selected)

Click Generate Geometry. Now a red line will appear.

Now back to the Project panel, select the new file with the words contour and cutout. Click the Selected panel. Enter the following for this CNC job:
CutZ: -2
Travel Z: 1
Feed rate: 60.0
Tool dia: 1.58
Click Generate.
FYI: 1.58 mm = 1/16 inch. You will use a 1/16 inch flat end milling bit to cut the board out of the blank, leaving 4 tabs around the sides to hold it in place.

Finally, back to the Project panel, and select the new cutout_cnc file. Click Selected. Scroll down and click Export G-Code, and call this file cutout_158.gcode and save it.

Carvey Time!

Go to easel.inventables.com and create an account.

Click New Project, then File > Import gcode, and select your PASS1.gcode file and see if it will import properly. Here is what mine looks like: