I’ve bought a 3018 CNC router kit and built it with the intention of mostly using it to mill PCBs as a first step.
I’ve just realised that I don’t have a clue what software to use to design PCBs or generate the toolpaths.
There appear to be a multitude of options out there! To cut down my research time, does anyone have any recommendations for ways to do this?
I’d be really interested to hear how you get on, as I’m interested in prototyping circuits without using PCB factories if possible. I’ve done it in the past with chemical etching and would prefer to avoid that too.
Software-wise, Kicad and Eagle are the most obvious candidates for PCB design.
In my experience Kicad has a slightly steeper learning curve but on the plus side it’s open source and has no limits on PCB size. It seems like most Eagle projects can also be opened in Kicad, and Eagle component libraries can be imported too. So I’m trying to stick with Kicad in future.
It’s a while since I’ve used either in earnest so maybe someone else can chip in.
To generate the tool paths, Carbide Create is very straightforward to use. I use GRBL for my drawing machine and have used Carbide for creating gcodes quite a bit.
