Manufacturing

It is truly fascinating.

Printed Circuit Boards

Helpful Resources from Advanced Assembly on the consumer / client side of PCB manufacturing and assembly.

Vitech PCB Equipment has their inventory of machines online. It would be nice to track down data sheets on these models to figure out what they do, why one would need them, range of cost, maintenance and upkeep, etc.

Chemcut has a whole line of etching machines/products that look interesting.

Western New York Suppliers

Started going through this list and found these:

• RPC Electronics seems to do everything but print the boards, but it might be worth calling them to determine their full capability. They seems to be located in northeast Ohio, judging by their (440) area code.
• Reliable Electronics also seems to mostly just handle assembly. They are located in Westchester County, NY (914) area code.
• Telan Corporation actually seems to be able to manufacture the PCB assemblies. They are located in Hatfield, PA, just north of Philadelphia (map).

CNC Milling

Also fascinating. It is all run by a thing called g-code. It would be interesting to design a language that describes how much to cut, how many passes, etc., and then feed an SVG file, with the compiled output consisting of g-code for a mill. Probably not terribly practical since most CAD/CAM systems already support g-code, and a large subset of manufacturer variations / incompatibilities.

Plastic Injection Molding

Watch the video.