The nice thing about doing you own PCBs by whatever method is that you can stop hand wiring prototypes. The more you do the better/faster you get. Regardless of how you make the board you should visit the pulsarProFx site and checkout what he is doing for a silscreen. --- I do it a bit different. After the board is etched I paint the top side of the board white with fusion paint. Use toner transfer to place the black silkscreen layer over the paint. I seal it with clear conformal coating to keep it from scratching off. The only problem is that after you paint the board you can not use anything other then soap and water to clean it. Most anything else will mess up the paint and artwork. The liquid fluxes I have also mess up the board. --- One problem with DIY boards is that they do not solder as easy as ones made in a board house. After the board is etched I clean the copper and spray it with a thin coat of conformal coating. The coating keeps the copper from oxidizing. The conformal coating does not seem to bother the soldering process. Maybe the iron vaporizes it. Not sure but they do solder well.

 

Excellent information there, 3v0 -- thanks for the link. Quite impressive (and why I didn't knock the toner transfer method -- only stated why I chose the method I did! ).

I am still amazed at the quality you can produce yourself. I guess it's been a long time since I looked at home-made PCBs!

 

Don't talk to me about PCBs !!!

I've been making them constantly for the past few days. My supplier of LEDs asked me a couple of months ago if I could make them up some demo PCBs to showcase their products on and I accepted the challenge.

Problem is that every component has a different footprint, different pin sizes and there are some obscure pin spacings.

On top of that, the writing for the component part numbers is etched on the top surface of the board so double sided boards are necessary.

I've got nearly 3000 holes to drill by hand over the next 2 days in a variety of 8 different hole sizes.

Apart from that making your own home PCBs is great fun

 

Im printing the layout about 4 copies and iron them all or less before I get the perfect layout. How do you toner method and UV? do I need kits or something?

 

Is this a hell of your own making ?

If you had a few months, you could have sent the boards off to have them made.

If you used Eagle and PCB-Gcode you could have a CNC drill the holes. You could have provided the Eagle parts library to your supplier and he could have made them available to his customers.

 

For UV exposure you have to spend the $8 for a Presensitized Copper Clad Board every time. See the list of materials and the process in earlier in this thread.

If you want to do toner transfer right visit www.PulsarProFx.com and get his kit for about $80. You will also need a good laminator.

Either way you need a laser printer.

If your are having problems with toner transfer you need to give a VERY detailed discription of what you are doing if you want meaningful help.
If you get the Pulsar toner transfer kit and a laminator the process is nearly foolproof.

 

A few months of going to and fro the customer and getting the designs correct then an email from the customer requesting its finished by the end of the week lol.

I was going to finish off my homemade CNC milling machine to do the drilling but the timescale doesn't allow it

On the bright side, once I've got this rush order of PCBs out of the way I can concentrate on getting the CNC mill going and then I've got a new toy to play with

 

Will be interesting to see it in action.

If I ever get around to it I would like to build a CNC too. There may come a day when I do not have the use of the one at school.

 

I'm dying to get it going - at the moment its taking up around a 1/5th of my workshop worktop place and every time I look at it I get the urge to burn it lmao.

On a more serious note, the X and Y axis are finished with the drives and motors mounted and tested. The Z axis is built but needs to be finished off with the drive and motor/coupling.

The motor driving circuit is completed for the X and Y axis - I'm using a full bridge circuit on each with Intersil Mosfet drivers. I've got a basic PIC PWM controller for the current regulation and the phase sequence control but thats as far as I got before people started throwing money at me to build them other bits and bobs.

If I can get these PCBs finished off this week then next week gets devoted to getting some more of it finished off.

My next project/product requires a hell of a lot of holes to be drilled on each board and they all have to be fairly precisely positioned and as my eyesight/co-ordination isn't getting any better with age .........

 

Yes, his board looks nice!
I've tried both methods, but for the past year and a half, I've been using the toner transfer method with better and better results. The iron temperature is the secret and the longer you can iron it (with a piece of paper in between) without melting the transfer, the better! Also, I DO NOT WASH OFF, but carefully PEEL OFF the backing dry. I initially used Techniks (blue) transfers, but due to very high price, I now use Pelican overhead Photocopy Film PCF100 for the job at a fraction of the price! Initially it SEEMS as if it does not work as well as the blue film, but with practise, the same results are obtained.

 

To each his own. But.... After using a laminator I would never go back to an iron. Have you tried the Pulsar paper. It does not melt. Line resolution is great (I have used .01 inch) It is coated with a starch that holds toner very well and dissolves rapidly in water. Pulsar paper is only $1.50 for a 8x10 sheet. IMHO is not worth messing with anything that may not work as well. If you use the Pulsar paper the quality of your boards will be limited by your laser printer, not the transfer process.

 

I use magazine paper for most of my PCBs which ss good enough for most applications.

Black light compact fluroscent lamps are probably the best thing you can use to expose your PCBs without going to the trouble of building anything as they run cool and give off plenty of UVA light.

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Hi Kyle,

the first glance on your design showed me good looking picture. The second glance caused an internal circuit to trigger.

That was because of the awfully big drill diameters and a little bit of coppper around them. To place and solder an IC to them shouldn't be a problem. To replace it you'll have a big problem arising before you touch the soldering iron.

An IC-socket (precision type) has a pin diameter of 0.6mm (0.0236inch). Using pads with a diameter of 1.6002mm (0.063 in) and a drill size of 0.8mm (0.032 in) and an octagon shape will eliminate the destruction possibility of pads. As already pointed out here, a square shape is the best, it will turn out not to be the best if you have to route traces around an IC-pin. The square takes too much place to go around it, while the octagon has 45deg angles and therefore the traces can be put closer around the pins if necessary to preserve space for other traces.

Eagle (Easily Applicable Graphic Layout Editor) is a very easy program to work with. I have been using Eagle from the very first version up to the latest (4.16). If you find any part in a library which doesn't meet your personal requirements you can copy and paste it, do the required changes and save it with a different name.

You can download the light version of Eagle 4.16 from http://www.cadsoft.de. There is no restriction using parts or making a schematic. The only restriction is the board size of max 80X80mm (3,15inches). However the plausibility check is in the wrong place. (Programmer error) Loading a board of a max possible size of 800X800mm (31.5X31.5inches) there are no restrictions.

Do not use a cracked version to load big size boards. There is another check which obviously refers to the license number. Eagle will refuse loading the layout in that case.

Regards

Boncuk

 

You mean to say that if you load a premade blank 800X800mm board, then you can add a schematic/parts and thus make your own 800X800mm board with the free version of Eagle?

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I haven't tried to load a blank board yet because of the fact that nobody designs an empty big size board. The steps with EAGLE are normally from a schematic to a board. You can of course omit a schematic and make a board with the limitations as already posted.

If you get a ready made board which exceeds the limited size (of making one) it will load.

I found it out accidently when shifting a big size board to version 4.16 made with version 3.55. Version 4.16 has the advantage of displaying reference marks for parts numbers and values and it is easier to move them around for a neat silk screen. (That works only after smashing a part.)

You can try by downloading any Eagle design and EAGLE light.

By the way, even EAGLE professional isn't a real professional program. Mixing metric and inch based parts the result in the design rule check is a never ending off-grid error list. Also the autorouter isn't what germans call the yolk of the egg. It tends to surround itself.