FacAcademy had used a great tool designed in-house for PCB milling making it stupid easy. I should be able to mill some PCBs at home right? Ha!
Method 1 Carbide Copper (web-based): Carbide Copper (Formally Rapid PCB)is by far the simplest solution for PCBs. A simple step by step process takes your Gerber and Excellon files and generates great g-code for your machine to run. Check it out below:
Method 2 Easel (web-based): Easel is the online CAM tool from Inventables, the makers of Xcarve. It has a lot of good settings in it and the interface is great. I just hate storing all my files online. Honestly I’m kinds sick of all these online “apps” that change settings and user interfaces elements all the time. Makes it impossible to follow a video tutorial after 6 months since nothing looks or works the same (looking at you AutoDesk!)
Method 3 FlatCAM: Once you create your PCB, you need to run a CAM process inside your PCB tool (such as EagleCAD or KiCAD, etc) to export the gerber and excellon files of your design. Gerber files basically throw all bottom traces into one file, all top traces into another, all drill files into another, etc. Then to view these, you need a Gerber viewer. Once you do that, you can use a CAM software to generate the tooling for making the board. This is where FlatCAm comes in. You import your gerber files and FlatCAM will help you create the path the PCBmill will need to move to create your circuit. I must say, I found FlatCAm’s user interface frustrating. YOu bring in your gerber of the bottom traces for instance, then click another tab to set up the tooling, then that creates another file in your project in which you must then select and select another tab (again) to finally generate the g code for your machine. You have to do the same with the top traces file, the drills file, and the dimension file. This seems convoluted and frustrated me.
Method 4 MakerCam: This method works well for Fritzing. You can export an SVG from Fritzing, then import that into inkscape for touch-ups, then on to MakerCAM to generate the final product.
Method 5 FabModules: The older linux-based Fabmodules won’t work for me, I’m not installing a bunch of junk on my PC just to run fab modules. Luckily, there’s a new web-based version at http://fabmodules.org The new version doesn’t seem to be as good as the old version in creating the output files. Here’s a basic intro to making PCBs with it:
Method 6 Fusion 360: While the newest version of Eagle has a plugin to send the PCB design to Fusion360, you can’t do anything useful with it (such as extrude the traces easily). It seems you have to redraw or trace the traces onto a Fusion360 sketch. While using “Smart snapping” can simplify this, it’s still something that should be automated. (Correct me in the comments if I am mistaken about this method). However, a friend of mine worked out a method that seems to have worked well for him. You export the EagleCAD as an PNG, then import the PNG to fabmodules to create an SVG of the outline of the traces, then import this SVG into fusion and extrude and generate toolpaths.
The workflow is similar to the video above for the fabmodules. Once you bring your SVG into Fusion360, extrude all the traces up about 0.2mm (could be time consuming) and extrude the remainder of the PCB downward -1.5mm and select a teeny-tiny endmill. If you have to, simply create this as a new tool. 1/64″ (0.39-0.4mm) is what FabAcademy uses typically. Then create a 2D contour around all the traces.