Milling plotter
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A milling plotter is a CNC machine for the machining of panel -shaped materials such as wooden panels or aluminum panels . A milling plotter can process thicker sheets of material than a cutting plotter .
history
Milling plotters emerged in the early 1980s with the advent of CAD design as an auxiliary tool for rapid prototyping .
background
Plotters are one of the few devices that directly reproduce vector graphics without converting them into raster graphics beforehand . Their forerunners were the XY recorders used in measurement technology . Since the 1990s, plotters have increasingly been replaced by large format printers , which are still often referred to as plotters today.
function
A milling plotter creates the required contours from an initially continuous sheet-like material layer. With a lower programmed immersion depth, it can also engrave surfaces.
This advantage is used, for example, to be able to produce fonts in control panels and front panels on the same machine that also mills the openings.
Another use is the "isolation milling" of conductor track prototypes , whereby the copper layer of the laminate is partially milled off with only a shallow depth of immersion where the conductor tracks are to be isolated from one another. With the increasing efficiency of the devices in the 1990s, the production of sample quantities with milling plotters also became economical for some applications.