CNC Shark Forum

I've been wanting to try making PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards, although these are milled rather than printed) on the Shark for a while now. I've also had a Halloween project I've been meaning to do for a few years. Finally the calendar aligned and I made these.
The LEDs (lights) will fade on, blink a few times, then fade out. The idea is to hide them in the yard, bushes, trees, etc. to give the impression of spooky goblins at night.

I cut the traces into the boards, then roughly cut each board on the scroll saw. I didn't care how nice the board shape looked for this project, though I might make that look nice in future projects.

The little chip on each board is a tiny microcontroller--a little smaller than a grain of rice. I could easily have gone for something more reasonably-sized, but I wanted to see if the Shark could produce PCBs with such fine accuracy. It worked well! I'll definitely be doing more PCBs going forward.

Cool! Glad you had success. I've gone that route, and also had good luck with a low-powered laser blasting off enamel paint to make a resist layer, then etching those with a mixture of hydrocholoric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Thanks for posting, Kayvon.

Thom

I'm familiar with that approach, though I've never tried it. I've even heard you can get away with simple hydrogen peroxide if you're patient.

As an incidental bonus, I finally figured out how the Save Toolpath Template functions work and found a situation in which they're useful. The turnaround time for PCBs is getting faster, though it's still as time consuming as other CNC projects are during the design phase.