We frequently neglect simply how good now we have it, so let me remind you simply how spoiled us makers are at present. In comparison with only a decade or two in the past, the accessibility of expertise to hobbyists has improved dramatically. Right this moment now we have an unimaginable array of reasonably priced, 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 house. Microcontrollers and single-board computer systems, just like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, have democratized entry to embedded methods and IoT improvement platforms. Even professional-grade check gear, reminiscent of oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, has turn out to be remarkably reasonably priced.
These advances lengthen to printed circuit boards (PCBs), however not in fairly the identical method. Sure, for a couple of bucks you may ship your design recordsdata to a producer and have the board present up at your own home in a matter of weeks. It is a large step ahead from when it was so costly and complicated a course of that it was out of attain for most individuals. However ready a couple of 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 a must to wait weeks for a repair. If solely we might produce production-quality PCBs at house in the identical method 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 house. Naturally it’s a must to put some constraints on a challenge 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 obligatory for a fundamental PCB.
Chopping some traces in a PCB will not be too terribly difficult, and has been performed by quite a lot of different hobbyists up to now, however vias are a complete totally different beast totally. These are the tiny elements that electrically join factors on one layer of a PCB with one other layer. The usual method 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 compounds, so it isn’t precisely pleasant for house use. Janssen got here up with another plan that replaces the electroless copper deposition course of with the appliance of a conductive ink, which is then electroplated to finish the by way of. Preliminary handbook checks labored nice, with resistance ranges corresponding to manufacturing processes being noticed.
After seeing this nice preliminary end result, Janssen constructed a prototype with a base of aluminum extrusions, a pair of customized device heads with x- and y-axis management, and microfluidic pumps to regulate the circulate of liquids for electroplating. This construct was fraught with difficulties, and required an entire rebuild from scratch at one level. However finally, after plenty of revisions, Janssen was capable of efficiently create a by way of utilizing the machine. The resistance ranges had been even acceptably low.
Sadly, there’s a large caveat. This end result was solely achieved when creating 1 mm vias, that are method too giant to be sensible. A typical by way of is just 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 lower 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. Remember to keep tuned to see the place this challenge goes. I, for one, would like to have a desktop PCB fabricator in my house lab!A machine like this may increasingly in the future allow at-home PCB manufacturing (📷: Levi Janssen)
Testing an early model of the actuation system (📷: Levi Janssen)
