PCB prototyping idea

I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated

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I got the demonstrator to try it out on 0.05mm thick copper foil. It worked very well on parallel lines 0.3mm spacing and letters where the vertical body of letters wer of qwerty were 2mm high and extra curveyness of the "fun" script cut out and came through perfectly well. She was so impressed she emailed a pic the engineering department of that company. Machine is roller feed of flat sheet. Requires firm , more than stick-it note, bonding of the foil to a backing or the foil will tear. The cutter was not new, a few months of about 22 hours a day use, often left running overnight for multiple outputs, like 3D printer operation.

Reply to
N_Cook
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How thin could it cut a line? Instead of 0.3 mm, ask her to try making

0.15 lines separated by 0.15 spaces. If it does that it would be useful for many types of prototypes. At 0.3 mm it's only good for relatively crude work on PCBs.
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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

The penetrating score lines must be about .1mm wide,going by eye, remember this was not a new cutter

Reply to
N_Cook

Hmmm, very interesting. Can you send me a picture of that test, too?

A guy I'm working with is doing wearable LED clothing. We made some prototypes with Rogers flexible PCB material, that is super expensive. It looks like this machine might be able to use some cheap laminated material, like they use for metallic labels. You just need to get the stuff made up with copper foil instead of aluminum. (Cricut seems to like stainless foil.)

Where did you get the copper foil? Was this just bare copper foil, or was the foil attached to some plastic backing? That's what I'd want, of course, to make a flexible PCB. Or, does Cricut supply the backing as a standard consumable?

Thanks for the info, looks VERY interesting.

One other area, can you feed it arbitrary drawings? How about Gerber files? (Yeah, I know, I'm asking a lot!!)

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Can you feed it a ordinary PCB blank?

I have a Stika "printer" which cuts stick-on tape that I've used successfully to mask sand-blasting glass with fairly intricate patterns.

I've been tempted to try that as an FeCl3 etch mask. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

single sided will do?

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Yes, the design is all single-sided, and quite low density.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

She had examples of neatly cut leather about 3mm thick, so presumable with correct offset for depth of cut , would work on this m/c

Reply to
N_Cook

we have some big rolls(~30cm diameter) of ~50cm wide copper on polyester?/capton? film in corner from some project before my time, couldn't have been that expensive considering the huge amount of it

should be quite easy to screen print, or maybe just run through printer and then etch

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Does this stuff have a generic or brand name? If you go looking for flexible PCB material, everybody wants to charge high prices. We are looking for something REALLY cheap, but may be using the wrong name for the material. Kapton is pretty expensive, but toleraes soldering heat well. I suspect we can find a soldering technique that uses minimal heat and time, so a cheaper substrate could be used.

Thanks,

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

What is an m/c?

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

It's a robot Master of Ceremonies, otherwise known as a Machine.

Mike.

Reply to
MJC

If you goolge Copper-clad Polyimide Film, you will get a lot of hits, Dupont makes something.. but lots of Ali-baba hits also.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

I'm guessing the Cricut needs a fairly thick backing so it doesn't cut all the way through. And, we don't need polyimide, although if it is affordable, that would be fine.

Thanks, I'll look around and see what is available.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Hmmm, well, all I see is flexible PC board material from Rogers or similar, some are as low as $0.25 per square INCH, which still adds up. One of the panels is 6 x 12", so that would be $18 for the just the material.

If we can stick copper foil onto something provided cheaply for the Cricut, that might be a LOT cheaper.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Hmmm, well, all I see is flexible PC board material from Rogers or similar, some are as low as $0.25 per square INCH, which still adds up. One of the panels is 6 x 12", so that would be $18 for the just the material.

If we can stick copper foil onto something provided cheaply for the Cricut, that might be a LOT cheaper.

Jon ==========================================================

Maybe one of these have something?

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(US company),
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(in China)

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Reply to
Carl Ijames

Would it cut a pattern on typical one-sided copper-on-FR4? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Well, of course, no prices anywhere. But, I'd guess just the copper foil will be cheaper than the flex PCB laminate.

Thanks,

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

We had samples of flexible FR4 (.1mm?) that looked pretty good.

Reply to
krw

Hmmm, well, the web site glosses over a bunch of stuff. First, NO MENTION whatsoever about HOW you get an image into the thing. I'm guessing it has a USB port, but then you'd have to have some software on your computer or tablet/phone/whatever. There's a video where they mention something about uploading your image to the web. This would be a deal killer right there, we don't want to let our IP be seen by anybody.

Also, especially if a P&P machine would be used, the cricut piece would have to dimensionally calibrated, at least. If you are uploading "pretty pictures" to the thing, what is the calibration? (I guess you'd just have to measure it.)

So, Mr. Cook, do you have any idea how you load data to it? Does the thing just look like a printer or something?

Thanks,

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

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