Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver
1 min read
Summary
For those who have grown impatient with constantly waiting for ordered PCBs to arrive, or frustrated by the challenges of creating your own at home with traditional techniques, the Circuit Graver could be a gamechanger.
Created by hacker Zach Fredin, and explained in his talk at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, the Circuit Graver is a CNC machine for scraping copper-clad boards to create traces for PCBs.
Instead of a high-speed spinning engraving head, or a laser etcher, the Circuit Graver uses a pointy tool to scrape away the copper to create the required design.
Its design, built with eBay parts and 3D-printed components, enables theproduction of modern, high-feature boards with excellent minimum feature sizes, and does so with speed, efficiency and a high level of precision.
Currently capable of producing traces of around 8mil, Fredin hopes to reduce this to 4mil with future upgrades, and whilst it is not intended for production PCBs, for quick prototyping the Circuit Graver looks to be an excellent tool.
