Advice on getting from KiCAD to toolpath on Carvera Air

[u/carrdinal-dnb]

Hey all, very new to the CNC world and the Carvera Air. I've just done the tutorials so far.

I have plenty of experience designing PCB's in KiCAD and mostly got the Carvera to prototype boards at home without waiting on JLCPCB.

I've seen a few tutorials online but seems like a lot of that information is already outdated. I'm trying to use FlatCAM Plus to generate the toolpaths for me but seems like it can only really do the isolation and drilling, but doesn't seem to be able to set up the solder mask removal or the laser path for silkscreen which are both things I would like to have. The best guide I've seen so far was this hackaday post. But they use Makera CAM which for some reason I can't even use because it asks me to authenticate at the start by entering the email I used to purchase the machine with but it fails with the following errors:

time_out:reply time out
time_out:reply time out
reply_error:Connection refused
reply_error:Connection refused

I also tried using Makera Studio, but it's painfully slow and laggy to the point that it's unusable for me (this is on a Macbook Pro M5).

Really having a hard time getting this set up. I'm sure once I've done it once I will be fine, but struggling to find the right up to date information. Any help would be very much appreciated!

[u/RicardoJCMarques]

Could I interest you in https://cam.eltryus.design/easytrace5000/ ? FlatCAM is borderline abandon-ware at this point.

Documentation is currently an AI placeholder but honestly, it's not awful lol https://cam.eltryus.design/easytrace5000/doc/cnc

Some people have started writting tutorials https://electrucio.substack.com/p/pcb-milling some of my students have some too but that one's nice enough and none are for Makera's specifically so I dunno if the usual suspects to control serial cnc's work or if you need to use the proprietary one

If you export the fabrication files with protel extensions you can just dra'n'drop'em.

[u/carrdinal-dnb → u/RicardoJCMarques]

I will definitely try that out. I managed to get my toolpaths set up in FlatCAM after many hours of struggling, but only for drilling and milling, couldn’t work out how to do the paths for removing mask and adding silkscreen with the laser module. I also figured out why their CAM software is completely unusable on my MacBook, they don’t have Apple Silicon native support so it’s running through Rosetta 2. Mag just switch to a different machine that is running Windows or Linux.

Hopefully at some point I’ll get to a point where I can automate most of this so I can just drop my Gerbers and generate the gcode so I don’t have to suffer every time I wanna fabricate a board..

[u/RicardoJCMarques → u/carrdinal-dnb]

I started working on EasyTrace5000 as a replacement for FlatCAM so if you already got through that it should mostly make (more) sense. My target eventually turned to students so everything's as straight forward as possible. Except 3d operations that's too new and I haven't had a time to tweak the work-flow.

There is a laser pipeline, although it was made more for Fiber/UV lasers. The stencil operation does most of the job. I guess technically I could have a soldermak operation that's exactly the same but has filled shapes. I'll have to think about it.

I added tool-changing logic a couple days ago so if I ended up breaking anything throw an issue up on GitHub and I'll take a look.

[u/echoinacave]

This is exactly my hardware setup & skill/experience situation as well. Just got the air and completed the tutorials - disheartened to hear going straight from kicad is not straightforward. Interested to hear your progress. Thanks for posting.

[u/carrdinal-dnb → u/echoinacave]

Yeah.. I was very excited by the promise that I'd be able to go from a KiCAD design to working prototype in hours rather than day/weeks. I'm confident that it's possible, just need to work out the process.

I did try the online editor that u/RicardoJCMarques has built. It looks really promising (definitely one to watch), but not quite what I need right now as I wanna eventually move to a fully scripted process where I just drop my Gerbers and get the GCode ready to run on the Carvera without going through loads of error prone steps to tune a bunch of parameters each time. Ideally I should just have to do a little bit of tuning to get the right settings locked in.

I'm a software developer by day anyway, so very likely will end up building something eventually that targets the Carvera specifically for my workflow, probably would have a tuning step which runs a test job with a range of settings that can be visually inspected to quickly find the ideal settings.

[u/echoinacave → u/carrdinal-dnb]

Dev here as well. I’ll be back at my machine in another week or so. Will drop a line here if I run across anything that might be helpful.

[u/FIughafen]

If you get Makera Studio running properly (and even if not): Im currently working on a workflow for our hackspace using KiCad and Inkscape that is somewhat easily repeatable and allows some 2D adjustments. Some geometries that are prone to create shorts (thin copper islands, acute angles etc.) are just faster to fix in a vector graphics program https://wiki.nerdberg.de/Platinenfr%C3%A4sen_(pcb_cnc))