Making your own Printed Circuit Boards
These hints are
worth gold! Some close friends, engineers, technicians and the like were admired
with the quality achieved by this process.
Again, the motivation arised after veryfing that in the brazilian market is very
hard to find materials for doing an industry-grade PCB at home. There are those
nasty pens (using them sucks)...there are transfer sheets ('Letraset' a load of
work for doing a pcb) and finally there aren´t those special transfer papers,
imported and mainly USA made. Even if we got them here, their cost would be
prohibitive.
After doing a good research on the Net and finding out some crazies that were using regular paper and a laser print for doing PCBs at home, I started to test many kinds of materials and papers until coming up with the final solution!
Ingredients:
A laser printer (It ONLY works with LASER Printers!) A friend of mine did some tests on a Xerox copier. It works, but sometimes the toner won´t come off the paper when you´re 'ironing' the board...
A4 Photo paper. The best brands for experimenting are EPSON and KODAK. Kodak is cool because you can use either side of the paper!
A good ironing "tool": I use a black&decker...really HOT... =)
And some more stuff, check the picture:
Instead of the electrical tape, use masking tape, since it won´t melt...
The first step is to have a PRINTED CIRCUIT ARTWORK. You can get this from the original designer OR use a software for doing it.
I use and like very much one called EAGLE. It´s excellent and freeware (limited for small sized boards and number of pins) and have one of the best part libraries that I´ve ever found. You can get it for free at http://www.cadsoft.de/.
The second step is to have the Copper board. It´s cheap and you can use one for many projects. The board pictured below is over a PHOTO PAPER SHEET, you can check the paper glare in the lower part of the picture. The board we are going to use is bigger than the test design showed here, just to demonstrate the proccess.
Print your artwork on the photo paper using a Laser Printer. PAY ATTENTION to the design, if needed, print MIRRORED (I confuse myself every time I do this....)
One important note: TRY TO USE AT LEAST 600 DPI for printings. The better the printing, the better your board will come up. If you use a low resolution your board is likely to get "pixelized", that is, with little squares or "ladders" on the tracks.
The artwork pictured below belongs to Brent Dane´s CLIFFTECH Site and is an R/C Voltimeter which is further explained in this page (portuguese, sorry). We´re goin to use as our example.
After printing I trimmed the paper like this. This will ease the task of taping it over the board.
Using some kind of thin steel wool, clean the board to remove any traces of copper oxide. After that, use the Isopropyl Alcohol to completely remove any traces of oil, grease, etc.
última atualização: 03/06/2004 17:09
