Since [Alessio] has been etching his own PCBs, he’s hit upon the most tedious part of the process, and the reason homebrew SMD boards are so awesome: drilling your own boards is a pain. While [Alessio]’s CNC mill takes care of most of the work, aligning the pre-drilled boards and correcting for any scaling issues from the mask is a bit difficult. With the help of a transform matrix, though, drilling PCBs has never been easier.

While the Gcode running the mill may be accurate, the actual manufactured PCBs might not be. If the extents on [Alessio]’s board aren’t exactly aligned with the axes of the CNC mill, the drill holes end up where they’re supposed to be. To solve this problem, [Alessio] wrote a PCB drilling transformational matrix calculator. The basic idea is by drilling just a few holes, [Alessio] is able to calculate any offset required in the Gcode with the help of a little bit of linear algebra.