Watching as layer after layer of a circuit is milled away is incredibly amusing. Even if you have no idea what you’re seeing, it is still fun to watch.
Mikeselectricstuff on youtube shared this video where he’s using a CNC mill to shave incredibly thin layers off of different pieces of a circuit to reveal the layer below. This could have been a fairly boring image gallery, but he’s presented it as a stop motion video that is almost hypnotic. I could actually see this as a music video for a band.
Filming something like this is actually pretty complicated. You can see exactly how it was done in this second video. He talks about how he set up his camera and modified his code to get the mill head out of the way for the picture. What’s really interesting is how he triggered his camera. His mill can trigger a pump for lubrication. He used this lubrication trigger as an output to actually trigger the shutter on his camera. The solution wasn’t quite that simple however, since the trigger signal to make the lubrication pump was too short. He introduced a tiny movement and a trigger to turn off the pump to get the perfect timing to trigger the camera.
That is such a creative and fun solution! I love the fact that it effectively turns his CNC mill into a stop motion animation machine.
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