![]() ![]() No one that reads Hackaday needs to be told why someone wants to build something even though they could buy it somewhere else. Or leave your favorite (and why) in the comments.ĭon’t get me wrong. We had a Hackerchat not long ago where several people mentioned their favorites. I’m going to stop short of recommending a particular board house so I don’t get accused of advertising for any particular one. Despite the advice in the video below, the best way to get ferric chloride stains out of things is to not use ferric chloride at all! I still have my tank for heating up ferric chloride (which should have the brand name Stain-it-all). Yes, my CNC mill will chip away copper (and end mills) and leave me with a board with no solder mask, no silk screen, and no plated through holes. You’ll get multiple layers, plated through holes, silk screen, and all the other things you expect in a professionally made board. But if you are willing to wait–and the wait doesn’t have to be that long–you can get beautifully produced boards at a very low cost, even if you are making only one or two boards. You can’t have an idea in the morning and look at a prototype PCB in the afternoon. ![]() Many of these are in Asia, but there are affordable options everywhere now. There are dozens (or maybe more) board houses that will produce your board cheaply. Click a button and you can send those files anywhere in the world. You can layout your PCB totally on the computer (or even in your browser). I never had the gall to try some of the homebrew etches because they had nasty chemicals, too. The clear etch wasn’t too bad, but the more readily available ferric chloride stains everything! I still have some marks on my patio concrete to prove that. The second worst part was handling all the chemicals. Granted, you can go surface mount, but most boards still need at least some holes (even if just for vias). Those holes really need to line up right (especially IC sockets) and if you screw it up, you get to start over at step 1. The worst part about making my own boards: the drilling. Silk screen wasn’t worth the trouble, although I’ve used rub on letters and later toner transfer to get a similar effect. And I never found a reasonable way to do solder mask. You could use some noxious chemicals to sort of plate the board, but it wasn’t as good. Just like single-sided boards are easier to delaminate than a double sided board, my homemade double sided boards had the same tendency because they were basically two singled-sided boards back-to-back. You may not have thought of it, but that copper connecting both sides on a commercial PCB add a lot of strength to the PCB tracks. You don’t get plated through holes, so you have to use wires or rivets to connect the sides. It is hard to do two sided boards (not impossible, but hard). But they were never the same as the commercial boards. ![]() I did a lot of boards myself in those days, especially prototype boards that were likely to have issues. Even the 100th board was expensive by today’s standards. The price for tooling was especially high. The cost was high, and with modern-day regulations on dumping chemicals would probably have been higher. They were 60 miles from our company, and that was handy because we’d drive over carrying giant rolls of artwork directly to the board house. They had an array of plating machines, photoplotters, and exotic chemical handling equipment. My reaction is invariably: “Why?” Back in the 1980s, I worked for a company that had PCBs made and our board house was going out of business. Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t ask me how to make a PCB in a home or small business lab. You also see a lot of people using 3D printers or CNC mills to create PCBs. There have been many ways that people have tried to bring PCB manufacturing into the hacker’s garage: stick on decals, light-sensitive blank PCBs, and even using laser printer toner (that last one spurred me to write a book on PCB layout many years back). Between removing the human from the wiring process and providing many excellent electrical properties (at least, on a well-designed board), it isn’t surprising that even the cheapest examples of electronics now use PCBs.įor many years, the hallmark of being a big-time electronic hacker was the ability to make your own PCBs. Cheap consumer electronics would not be as cheap if someone still had to wire everything (although by now we’d be seeing wiring robots, I’m sure). Few things have had the impact on electronics that printed circuit boards (PCBs) have had. ![]()
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