CNC Router And Fiber Laser Bring The Best Of Both Worlds To PCB Prototyping

March 4, 2025 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes, and that’s especially true for PCB prototyping tools. Sure, it’s possible to use a CNC router to mill out a PCB, and ditto for a fiber laser. But neither tool is perfect; the router creates a lot of dust and the fiberglass eats a lot of tools, while a laser is great for burning away copper but takes a long time to burn through all the substrate. So, why not put both tools to work?

Of course, this assumes you’re lucky enough to have both tools available, as [Mikey Sklar] does. He doesn’t call out which specific CNC router he has, but any desktop machine should probably do since all it’s doing is drilling any needed through-holes and hogging out the outline of the board, leaving bridges to keep the blanks connected, of course.

Once the milling operations are done, [Mikey] switches to his xTool F1 20W fiber laser. The blanks are placed on the laser’s bed, the CNC-drilled through holes are used as fiducials to align everything, and the laser gets busy. For the smallish boards [Mikey] used to demonstrate his method, it only took 90 seconds to cut the traces. He also used the laser to cut a solder paste stencil from thin brass shim stock in only a few minutes. The brief video below shows the whole process and the excellent results.

In a world where professionally made PCBs are just a few mouse clicks (and a week’s shipping) away, rolling your own boards seems to make little sense. But for the truly impatient, adding the machines to quickly and easily make your own PCBs just might be worth the cost. One thing’s for sure, though — the more we see what the current generation of desktop fiber lasers can accomplish, the more we feel like skipping a couple of mortgage payments to afford one.

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Lathe And Laser Team Up To Make Cutting Gear Teeth Easier

February 14, 2025 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Fair warning: watching this hybrid manufacturing method for gear teeth may result in an uncontrollable urge to buy a fiber laser cutter. Hackaday isn’t responsible for any financial difficulties that may result.

With that out of the way, this is an interesting look into how traditional machining and desktop manufacturing methods can combine to make parts easier than either method alone. The part that [Paul] is trying to make is called a Hirth coupling, a term that you might not be familiar with (we weren’t) but you’ve likely seen and used. They’re essentially flat surfaces with gear teeth cut into them allowing the two halves of the coupling to nest together and lock firmly in a variety of relative radial positions. They’re commonly used on camera gear like tripods for adjustable control handles and tilt heads, in which case they’re called rosettes.

To make his rosettes, [Paul] started with a block of aluminum on the lathe, where the basic cylindrical shape of the coupling was created. At this point, forming the teeth in the face of each coupling half with traditional machining methods would have been tricky, either using a dividing head on a milling machine or letting a CNC mill have at it. Instead, he fixtured each half of the coupling to the bed of his 100 W fiber laser cutter to cut the teeth. The resulting teeth would probably not be suitable for power transmission; the surface finish was a bit rough, and the tooth gullet was a little too rounded. But for a rosette, this was perfectly acceptable, and probably a lot faster to produce than the alternative.

In case you’re curious as to what [Paul] needs these joints for, it’s a tablet stand for his exercise machine. Sound familiar? That’s because we recently covered his attempts to beef up 3D prints with a metal endoskeleton for the same project.

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Perfecting 20 Minute PCBs With Laser

January 5, 2025 by Al Williams 40 Comments

Normally, you have a choice with PCB prototypes: fast or cheap. [Stephen Hawes] has been trying fiber lasers to create PCBs. He’s learned a lot which he shares in the video below. Very good-looking singled-sided boards take just a few minutes. Fiber lasers are not cheap but they are within range for well-off hackers and certainly possible for a well-funded hackerspace.

One thing that’s important is to use FR1 phenolic substrate instead of the more common FR4. FR4 uses epoxy which will probably produce some toxic fumes under the laser.

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DIY Fiber Laser Adds Metal Cutting To The Mix

January 13, 2023 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Sadly, the usual CO₂-powered suspects in the DIY laser cutter market are woefully incapable of cutting metal. Sure, they’ll cut the heck out of plywood and acrylic, and most will do a decent job at engraving metal. But cutting through a sheet of steel or aluminum requires a step up to much more powerful fiber laser cutters. True, the costs of such machines can be daunting, but not daunting enough for [Travis Mitchell], who has undertaken a DIY fiber laser cutter build that really caught our eye.

Right off the bat, a couple of things are worth noting here. First — and this should be obvious from the fountains of white-hot sparks in the video below — laser cutters are dangerous, and you should really know what you’re doing before tackling such a build. Second, just because [Travis] was able to cut costs considerably compared to a commercial fiber laser cutter doesn’t mean this build was cheap in absolute terms — he reports dropping about $15,000 so far, with considerable ongoing costs to operate the thing.

That said, there doesn’t appear to be anything about this build that anyone with some experience building CNC machines wouldn’t be able to tackle. The CNC side of this is pretty straightforward, although we note that the gantry, servos, and controller seem especially robust.

The laser itself is an off-the-shelf machine, a Raycus RFL-C1000 fiber laser and head that packs a 1,000-Watt punch. There’s also the required cooling system for the laser, and of course there’s an exhaust system to get rid of the nasty fumes.

All that stuff requires a considerable investment, but we were surprised to learn how much the consumables cost. [Travis] opted for bottled gas for the cutter’s gas assist system — low-pressure oxygen for carbon steel and high-pressure nitrogen for everything else. Refills are really pricey, in part because of the purity required, but since the proper compressor for the job is out of the budget for now, the tanks will have to do. And really, the thing cuts like a dream. Check out the cutting speed and precision in the video below.

This is but the first in a series of videos that will detail the build, and if [Travis] thought this would whet our appetites for more, he was right. We really haven’t seen many DIY fiber laser builds, but we have seen a teardown of a 200-kW fiber laser that might tickle your fancy.

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Laser Engraving, Up Close

October 15, 2022 by Al Williams 11 Comments

You know you aren’t supposed to watch your laser while it is cutting or engraving. But [Alex] hosted Wired in his studio and showed them how lasers engrave metal with a fiber laser. You can see the video below.

If you haven’t used a fiber laser, you might be surprised that while a 60 W model can burn metal, it does absolutely nothing to [Alex’s] hand. We wouldn’t try that, by the way, with the common diode lasers you see in most hacker’s labs these days. The video isn’t terribly technical, but it is interesting to see different metals succumb to the powerful laser. There are a few tips about marking different metals in different ways and how to deal with thermal expansion and other effects.

Fiber lasers aren’t as common as diode engravers in private shops, but we assume it is just a matter of time before they get cheaper. Not to mention their widespread use commercially means surplus units might become available, too.

If you are interested in lasers, [Alex’s] YouTube channel has quite a few interesting videos to check out. If you need more power, how’s 200 kW? Then again, even 20 W will get you something useful.

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Micromachining With A Laser

April 19, 2022 by Al Williams 3 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has a nice pulsed fiber laser and decided to try it to micromachine with silicon. You can see the results in the video below. Silicon absorbs the IR of the laser well, although the physical properties of silicon leave something to be desired. He also is still refining the process for steel, copper, and brass which might be a bit more practical.

The laser has very short duration pulses, but the pulses have a great deal of energy. This was experimental so some of the tests didn’t work very well, but some — like the gears — look great.

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Open Source Replacement For EzCAD

January 16, 2022 by Chris Lott 24 Comments

[Bryce] obtained a fiber laser engraver to use for rapid PCB prototyping last Fall. But he was soon frustrated by the limitations of the standard EzCAD software that typically comes with these and similar devices — it is proprietary, doesn’t have features aimed at PCB manufacturing, only runs on Windows, and is buggy. As one does, [Bryce] decided to ditch EzCAD and write his own tool, Balor, named after the King of the Fomorians.

The controller board in [Bryce]’s machine is a Beijing JCZ LMCV4-FIBER-M board, containing an Altera FPGA and a Cypress 8051 USB controller. So far, he hasn’t needed to dump or modify the FPGA or 8051 code. Instead, he sorted out the commands by just observing the USB operations as generated by a copy of EzCAD running know operations. A lot of these engraving systems use this control board, but [Bryce] want’s to collect data dumps from users with different boards in order to expand the library.

Balor is written in Python and provides a set of command line tools aimed at engineering applications of your engraver, although still supporting regular laser marking as well. You can download the program from the project’s GitLab repository. He’s running it on Linux, but it should work on Mac and Windows (let him know if you have any portability issues). Check out our write-up from last year about using these lasers to make PCBs. Are you using a laser engraver to make rapid prototype boards in your shop? Tell us about your setup in the comments.