We regularly neglect simply how good we’ve it, so let me remind you simply how spoiled us makers are immediately. In comparison with only a decade or two in the past, the accessibility of know-how to hobbyists has improved dramatically. Right now we’ve an unimaginable array of inexpensive, cutting-edge applied sciences at our fingertips. 3D printers, which had been as soon as the stuff of science fiction, are actually ubiquitous and comparatively cheap, permitting customized components to be manufactured at dwelling. Microcontrollers and single-board computer systems, just like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, have democratized entry to embedded programs and IoT growth platforms. Even professional-grade check tools, akin to oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, has turn into remarkably inexpensive.
These advances prolong to printed circuit boards (PCBs), however not in fairly the identical approach. Sure, for a couple of dollars you possibly can ship your design recordsdata to a producer and have the board present up at your own home in a matter of weeks. This can be a enormous step ahead from when it was so costly and complicated a course of that it was out of attain for most individuals. However ready just a few weeks is a reasonably large hurdle if you find yourself attempting to iterate on a design. And discovering even a small mistake turns into an enormous deal when it’s important to wait weeks for a repair. If solely we might produce production-quality PCBs at dwelling in the identical approach that we 3D print components…
That is the dream of many manufacturers, together with Levi Janssen, who determined to attempt to make it a actuality. Janssen got down to make a 3D printer-like desktop PCB fabricator that’s easy sufficient to make use of at dwelling. Naturally it’s important to put some constraints on a venture like this to maintain it possible, so he determined to restrict the machine to producing 2-layer boards with traces and vias — no bigger stacks of layers or solder masks, silkscreening, or the rest that’s technically not mandatory for a fundamental PCB.
Chopping some traces in a PCB will not be too terribly difficult, and has been accomplished by plenty of different hobbyists previously, however vias are a complete completely different beast fully. These are the tiny parts that electrically join factors on one layer of a PCB with one other layer. The usual approach of doing that is by drilling a gap within the board, utilizing an electroless copper deposition course of to put down a skinny base of copper, earlier than lastly electroplating this base to construct it up and cut back electrical resistance between layers.
However this course of requires a dozen poisonous and corrosive chemical substances, so it isn’t precisely pleasant for dwelling use. Janssen got here up with an alternate plan that replaces the electroless copper deposition course of with the appliance of a conductive ink, which is then electroplated to finish the through. Preliminary guide exams labored nice, with resistance ranges akin to manufacturing processes being noticed.
After seeing this nice preliminary consequence, Janssen constructed a prototype with a base of aluminum extrusions, a pair of customized software heads with x- and y-axis management, and microfluidic pumps to manage the move of liquids for electroplating. This construct was fraught with difficulties, and required a whole rebuild from scratch at one level. However in the end, after a lot of revisions, Janssen was capable of efficiently create a through utilizing the machine. The resistance ranges had been even acceptably low.
Sadly, there’s a huge caveat. This consequence was solely achieved when creating 1 mm vias, that are approach too giant to be sensible. A typical through is simply 0.3 mm, and when Janssen tried to make use of the identical processes at this scale, no quantity of tweaking might make it work.
Whereas issues are less than snuff at this level, Janssen continues to be engaged on the issue. He has some concepts that — in the event that they work — have the potential to outperform current manufacturing processes. You should definitely keep tuned to see the place this venture goes. I, for one, would like to have a desktop PCB fabricator in my dwelling lab!A machine like this will sooner or later allow at-home PCB manufacturing (📷: Levi Janssen)
Testing an early model of the actuation system (📷: Levi Janssen)
