"New" DYI PCBs..

Den mandag den 11. november 2013 17.28.41 UTC+1 skrev Robert Baer:

The article is about printing the tracks using conductive ink, not printing etch resist

have you tried using a copier/laser printer on a piece of pcb?

I've alway heard that it wouldn't work because printing on anything conductive messes with the way statics electricity is used to generate the image

-Lasse

I'm not sure there's that much demand for water-soluble circuitry.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

See:

My comment to original poster:

(Yawn) Back in the 1980s, there was a Xerox copier that had a flat paper path from input to output, and could tolerate or be adjusted to thick materials. Just make a positive image original, and copy it to your PCB; the black fused powder made an excellent resist. (Yawn)

There is no technical reason that inkjets cannot be effective. Absolute criteria: (1) paper path MUST be straight from input start to output finish, (2) printer MUST allow thick paper/cardboard as most PCB material is 0.063, and (3) the ink should be fast drying to reduce possible smear. I could be wrong, but I think that most "common" inkjet printers fail criteria one, and a goodly percentage fail criteria two.

You FAILED to READ what I said. Those Xerox printers worked, produced good images for etching.

Not a heck of a lot of difference conductive coating or resist as net result at end is a working PCB. Should not be a big deal to formulate conductive powder and ?modified? drum for printing. Since there are no Xerox type printers that meet the criteria i stated in another posting, neither method (conductive or resist) is useful. Gotta have the hardware; the conductive print scheme is 3.1415928etc in the sky and will never happen for real production. Maybe a few rich tinkers doing low production. The hardware for NC drill-produced PCBs started as a garage idea, and the cost of DIY for the machines started low enough to slowly grow into a useful niche market,but even so, it ain't mainstream by a long shot. Those university guys have their heads in the clouds.

What non-water soluble inks and associated printers are, as you say, "common"? Not some $5K-$100K solvent/UV sign printing rig.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Back in the day, I tried to make PCB's with a pen plotter. There was a Staedtler 745 ink. Curiously missing from the catalog. Had to order it from Canada. Seems that it was rather toxic. And it ate the plastic of the pens, so you had to plot fast. But it was an excellent resist.

It looks good except for this part: "Attach electronic components to the circuit using conductive double-sided tape or silver epoxy adhesive."

That looks time consuming, only good for little things like demo circuits, you'll be there forever with anything used in the real world.

IDIOT! ONE: the material placed on the PCB is for an etching mask, and TWO: there are a number of NON-water soluble inks, even epoxy inks (which should not be used because they would need to be buffed off).

I remember some recommendation of that kind. Red color, wasn't it?

Radio Shack used to sell etch resist pens.. one could draw a crude circuit freehand (down to 100-mil DIP size or so, and etch it. No endless fiddling with long lists of DRC rules, importing 3D CAD models, etc. etc. Just draw and go.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Such printers exist. They can be used to print directly on metal panels, cell phone cases, aluminum signs etc. They compete with screen printing.

Okay, I'll bite. Where can I get a non-water-soluble ink (cartridge?) to work in a Canon Pixma MG2220?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I said that most "common" inkjet printers fail to meet the minimal criteria of straight paper path and allowance for (in effect) cardboard. I did not say shit about anything expensive, that is YOUR fabrication. And it is easy as falling off a log to find non-water soluble inks, including epoxy inks that will work in any inkjet printer. I also implied that epoxy inks are to be avoided (think about it).

Check. Didn't i imply this was a toy for rich idiots and was not viable for even small scale production?

You can still get those pens.

Not great for TQFP though :-(

How about this?

I use Press-n-Peel Blue iron-ons. It binds to laser printer toner so it transfers without smearing and it is not longer porous to etchant. I've had perfectly clean boards with 0.4mm traces in 10 minutes.

The trick is to warm up everything before pressing so that there's no thermal shearing stress. Very tiny boards need to be clamped between two glass plates.

It, AFAIK, is a DIY project - by a "mod" of an existing cartridge: flush the existing ink and add what you want.

Yep, the ink was just too hard to deal with...and I was running out of pens.

The Staedtler Lumocolor 313 pens in red do a credible job. Biggest problem I had with pens was that the design program was optimized for a photoplotter and did line segments in order of least motion. That meant that the pen often joined a wet line to a dry one. There were corner issues. Never had the energy to try to fix it. About that time, IC pin pitch got too small for my .005" plotter resolution and I switched to toner transfer.