The very “thin” solder paste mixture gives a pretty even and thin coating and doesn’t have enough solder to bridge anything. I found that taking a very small blob of solder paste, and mixing it with a much larger amount of gel/paste flux (like 3 or 4 times the flux to solder paste, until it’s quite a pale grey mixture rather than the dark grey of normal solder paste), then spreading it on the board (paint it on) and then heating it up (even just on an upside down iron) works well.
Dry film resist is a lot less faffing about, make your artwork once, use it many times.Īs for tinning, the chemical mixtures are a bit of a pain to get.
#Pcb printers registration#
I don’t know if he’d be able to get much in the way of registration if doing double sided boards with this method either. If you’re going to try this, at least wear a mask, preferably do it in a sealed box, and ideally do it in a negative pressure box. Posted in Tool Hacks Tagged inkjet, inkjet printer, pcb, toner, toner transfer Post navigationīlowing toner around your workplace is really not good for your health, not to mention it gets everywhere and sticks. For more direct to copper printing check out the hacks we’ve covered in years past. Impressive work, and now the only thing left to do is getting two-layer boards down pat. says the method should work on sheets of aluminum for printing solder paste masks. The result, seen above, are perfect traces on a circuit board without the need for ironing sheets of photo paper onto copper boards.Īs far as the, “why didn’t someone think of this sooner” ideas go, this one is at the top. While some specialty inks are enough of an etch resist, comes up with a clever way to make sure acid doesn’t eat away copper in the needed places – he simply dusts on toner from a copier or laser printer, blows off the excess, and bakes the entire board in a toaster oven. When the board comes out of the printer, it’s only covered in ink. By sticking a piece of cardstock in the printer before the copper board, he’s able to precisely align the traces and pads onto the copper board. ’s boards begin by taking the output from Eagle and printing them with an Epson Artisan 50 inkjet printer.
isn’t quite there yet, but his method of producing circuit boards at home is one of the easiest we’ve ever seen. Instead of mucking about fabbing PCBs with the toner transfer method, or making masks for photosensitive boards, the holy grail of at-home circuit board manufacturing is a direct inkjet-to-etch method.