you can make your own printed circuit boardin a number of different ways. you can use chemicals. or you can have your board professionallymade at a fabrication house or you can use one of these - a milling machine. as always, you'll need to start with a designfor your board.
3d printed circuit board technology, the othermill accepts most common pcb designfile formats. i’m using eagle cad software here which exports in .brd format. but this time - instead of my own design,i'll be using this capacitive synth layout from the othermachine company because ... iwant to play it.
the capacitive synth only has one layer oftraces, so we can use a single-sided copper clad board. if we were milling a double sided board wecould employ an bracket to make sure both sides line up properly. but we’re keepingthings simple - so we’ll just use some double-sided tape to keep the board stable during milling. make sure it's squared up with the mountingplate and press it down nice and secure before getting started. the othermill software is pretty straightforward. open up the board file for our project - andspecify the endmill size we'll be using.
this design can be cut using 1/32 inch and1/64 inch endmills. we'll start with the smaller of the two - which will only be used for theholes and a few tight corners. after the mill goes through a quick calibrationprocess ... we can begin cutting copper. once the mill is done using the 1/64 inchendmill, it will automatically pause and prompt me to install the 1/32 inch. since this is a relatively large board, theentire process takes a little under 2 hours to complete.but after that our board is good to go and ready to solder.
pleasingly glitchable, capacitively touchable- i like it.
keep in mind - you can make more than justelectronics with this thing. you can also make ... cat pins. … credits.
