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lasercut PCB fixture, made in Eagle

misusing Eagle for mechanical CAD - to build a precision PCB cradle.

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a cradle to support a 12" long circuit board at exactly the right position, over a 125 Celsius temperature span. lots of Eagle-wizards are beginning to get into mechanical design. they are tinkering with Illustrator or Rhino or Solidworks. none of this is necessary. use Eagle!

1. build a fixture which holds a large circuit board three inches off the ground

2. at a 30-degree angle

3. with lots of space underneath for wiring

4. and a temperature range of -40 to +85 Celsius

5. in 48 hours.

how? with lasercut Delrin, designed entirely in Eagle. you should design all your electronic chassis and boxes in Eagle. they will fit your electronics magnificently.

  • 4 × Delrin sheets 1x2 foot sheets of white Delrin.
  • 351 × lasers two straight hours of 50W lasering.
  • 1 × copy of Eagle yes Eagle.

  • all at once

    tshen208/05/2014 at 14:23 0 comments

    problème du jour:

    1. build a fixture which holds a large circuit board three inches off the ground
    2. at a 30-degree angle
    3. with lots of space underneath for wiring
    4. and a temperature range of -40 to +85 Celsius
    5. in 48 hours.

    how fun! let's go.

    Constraints 1 & 2 & 3: 30-degree angle, 3 inches off the ground, space underneath for wiring

    we could have accomplished 1 & 2 by stacking solid materials underneath the circuit board, until we'd built a hill, and it would have the right height and angle. but 3 won't let us do that. the thing must be supported lightly, with free space underneath.

    this sounds like a precision job. a lasercutter job!

    Constraint 4: -40 to +85 Celsius temperature range

    now this gets thorny. lasers cut materials by heating them until they vaporize. but this material must be ok with high temperatures. conflict?

    Option 1: acrylic. the laser nerd's favorite. but acrylic sheets get sad and bendy at 85 Celsius. no can do!

    Option 2: polycarbonate. super tough. chill with hot, hawt with cold. when cut with a laser, it releases poison. i prefer breathing not-poison.

    Option 3: white Delrin. tough enough. does its job. cuts without hastening death. Delrin it is!

    with a wide temperature range, you have to worry about thermal expansion of materials. my fixture will cup the circuit board, and it will contract faster than the circuit board when things get cold, so it must be too big at room temperature.

    how too big?

    linear thermal expansion coefficient of Delrin: 122ppm/Celsius

    linear thermal expansion coefficient of FR4: 14ppm/Celsius

    difference in coefficients: 108ppm/Celsius

    -40 Celsius is 65 Celsius below room temperature.

    fractional thermal contraction at -40 Celsius = (108ppm/Celsius)*(65 Celsius) = 7020ppm

    the circuit board is 12 inches long.

    thermal contraction at -40 Celsius = (12 inches)*(7020ppm) = 0.08 inches

    so we should oversize our fixture by 0.08 inches.

    and there it is!

    Constraint 5: do this in 48 hours

    we've already started :D

    i do mechanical drawings in Eagle. Solidworks hates me for this one weird trick. Eagle is for making electronics, not lasercutting plastic. but Eagle lets you draw lines on layers, and save those layers as EPS files, and your lasercutter thinks EPS files are delicious.

    now the 'lasercut0' layer is lasercutter food.

    why do this? now you're designing circuits and mechanical parts on the same page, with the same software.

    will they fit super-perfectly? yes. can you do cool new things? yes yes.

    here's a map of DelrinLand.

    at the lasercutter, i discovered that Delrin is harder to cut than expected.

    so i doubled my laser power.

    and then tripled.

    and then quadrupled.

    and it still didn't cut through.

    so i smote it with a hammer, and here are the results.

    $350 of laser power, on the company budget

    all crispy and t-nutted.

    it fits!

    Tshen2 2014

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Adam Fabio wrote 08/06/2014 at 04:40 point
Good to see I'm not the only "crazy person" who's used PCB cad/cam software to build mechanical designs. I created an entire robot base (and drill plan) in Diptrace. It worked rather well!

  Are you sure? yes | no

tshen2 wrote 08/06/2014 at 12:51 point
very cool! and i imagine, the electronics lined up with the mechanical parts in a truly sublime manner. you'll be seeing that in several of my projects going forwards :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

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