A CAM toolchain for making printed circuit boards at home — one tool for the whole cycle, from fab package to finished board.
Cuprum takes a Gerber/Excellon fab job and drives the machines on your bench to produce a real PCB. It treats fabrication as a set of processes — each one a (layer, machine, action) — and ties them together with shared fiducials so the steps register against each other automatically.
The first process to land is UV photolithography: exposing the copper artwork through a high-resolution UV LCD (Cuprum currently drives an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K). Drilling and edge-cut routing on a CNC are next on the roadmap.
Status: early, actively developed. The UV exposure pipeline works end-to-end; the rest of the CAM features (drill, edge-cut routing, fiducial registration) are on the roadmap. See
docs/VISION.md.
Cuprum plays to each tool's strengths rather than forcing one machine to do everything:
- Light for copper. Exposing traces and pads is parallel — the entire artwork lands in a single flash (~90 s) regardless of trace density or how many boards are on the bed. A modern UV LCD also resolves a fine pitch (a 16K screen is ≈14×19 µm per pixel), finer than a cheap CNC mill can route.
- CNC for the rest. Use a mill only where light can't help: drilling holes and cutting the board outline.
- Fiducials tie it together. One set of registration marks links every process, so exposure → drilling and double-sided alignment become automatic.
| Component | Crate / dir | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Core library | crates/cuprum-core |
Gerber parsing, rasterization (tiny-skia), composition onto the 15120×6230 screen, .goo encoding, and the SDCP protocol (discover / upload / expose). |
| CLI | crates/cuprum-cli |
cuprum binary: discover, gerber-info, render, prepare, print, calibrate, gen-goo, upload, expose, stop. |
| Project model | crates/cuprum-project |
The self-contained .cuprum project container and the recents catalog. |
| Desktop UI | cuprum-ui |
Tauri 2 + React app: native-sharp preview, CAD-style navigation (zoom-to-cursor, pan, grid, snapping), multi-select, alignment/auto-layout, 3D board view, and one-click exposure. |
- Rust (stable, edition 2021)
- For the desktop UI: Node.js, pnpm, and the Tauri 2 prerequisites for your platform.
# Build the whole workspace
cargo build --release
# Find a printer on the LAN
cargo run -p cuprum-cli -- discover
# Inspect a Gerber file
cargo run -p cuprum-cli -- gerber-info path/to/board.gbr
# Render a Gerber to a PNG preview (no printer involved)
cargo run -p cuprum-cli -- render path/to/board.gbr out.pngRun cargo run -p cuprum-cli -- --help for the full command list.
⚠️ Theexposeand
cd cuprum-ui
pnpm install
pnpm tauri devcrates/ Rust workspace (core, cli, project model)
cuprum-ui/ Tauri 2 + React desktop app
vendor/ Vendored dependencies (see Acknowledgements)
testdata/ Sample Gerber files
spikes/ Throwaway scripts used while reverse-engineering the protocol
docs/ Vision, design system, and development notes
See docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for contributor notes (notably:
bump the relevant disk-cache version tag when you change derived output).
- Gerber rendering builds on
MakerPnP/gerber-viewer
(MIT OR Apache-2.0), vendored under
vendor/gerber-viewer.
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.