Circuit Eye Candy: Gallery of 14 Beautiful PCBs
Our Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine's middle name is PCB, and while it can easily mill a wide variety of materials—from wax to metal to wood—what it's best known for is empowering you with the ability to precisely and rapidly mill professional-quality printed circuit boards directly from your workbench. Forget using toxic chemicals to etch your circuits or sending files to a board house and losing momentum on iteration while waiting. Design, mill, test, iterate, repeat. Our Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine gives you the clear advantage.
Circuit board milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine
We're always thrilled to see what our community members are making with their Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machines, and we constantly have our eyes on social media streams so we can celebrate and share their creations. Here are some of the beautiful PCBs we've seen lately. Share your creations, PCB and beyond, and tag us #bantamtools and @bantamtools. We'd love to see what you make!
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Bandkami’s Motor Controllers
Michigan-based engineer maker couple Bandkami share, "These boards were designed as motor controllers to read encoders and perform closed loop control on setpoints delivered over an SPI link via the signal distribution board in the second picture. They were also made to have the same form factor as the motor driver boards being used. ... Super easy to get repeatable results, even when milling 8 copies of double sided boards!"
Their boards were designed in DipTrace and milled on the precise, reliable Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine.
Richad Marier’s Mazda Tail Light Conversion
Community member Richard Marier just completed an LED tail light conversion on his Mazda Miata MX5. It turns the flasher into a parking and brake light (and the flasher still works). Richard shares, “Prototyping a board to fit inside the lamp was crucial and made easy with the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine.”
Chasin Spin’s Weather Station
Pictured above are finished circuit boards, milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine, used for ChasinSpin's rooftop-mounted storm-chasing weather station. These boards will be mounted in white PVC tubes.
The three pictures below show ChasinSpin's custom intervalometer/lightning trigger. He shares, "The lightning detector circuit is designed to only allow near-infrared pulses through (which is where the peak spectrum of lightning can be found), and the reaction time is 183uS from the start of the lightning pulse to the trigger instructing the camera to take a photo. Additionally, because whilst storm chasing, you often want to take time-lapse and lightning shots at the same time, it can take lightning photos in between time-lapse shots. It will detect lightning during the day or night."
Read our interview with ChasinSpin for more.
Daniel HienzsCh’s Precise Boards
Check out these tiny, precise beauties from Supplyframe DesignLab's Daniel Hienzsch, all milled on the professional-quality Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine.
Dave Camp’s Pinball Machine Display Boards
This one comes to us courtesy of Dave Camp via Twitter. Shown here is the third prototyping board for replacing Dave's 80s pinball machine display board, milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine. The top board gets a set of 16-segment LEDs and connects to the bottom board, which gets a Teensy 3.2, an Adafruit LED matrix driver, and a bunch of giant Molex connectors.
Bladeky’s Backup Aircraft Instrumentation
Over on Instagram, BladeKey shared this backup aircraft instrumentation, made using the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine, a Punch Through Design Bean+, Xcode, and a MakerBot Replicator. Neat!
Qasim Dove's
Qasim Dove’s Handheld Game
Check out this awesome custom handheld Lexaloffle Games PICO-8 console with PCB milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine by Qasim Dove, spotted on Twitter.
Chris’s Hospital Bed Breakout Board
Community member Chris shared his custom-built breakout board for a hospital bed, milled on the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine!
Adria Junyent-Ferre's Coil Driver
Adria Junyent-Ferre shared a new iteration of his small coil driver that sits atop an Arduino Nano. He captions, "This took exactly one hour to mill using #bantamtools including tool changing etc. PRO TIP: Mill 0.3mm of holes & edges on the first side and complete from the other side. No spoilboard/copper damage."
Professional Reliability & Precision:
What makes the Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine such a powerhouse for milling professional-quality PCBs directly from your desktop?
• Accuracy: <0.003’’ per 6’’ linear travel / <0.0762 mm per 152.4mm linear travel
• Highest Resolution: 0.000125 in / 3.18 microns
• Milled parts & PCBs come out as you expect
• Trace & Space: 6 mil / 0.006 in / 0.1524 mm
• Highly reliable technology & software
• Repeatability: ± 0.001 in / 0.0254 mm
• Quickly find and fix design errors