Caught a Youtube video the other night of a PCB manufacturing technique that impressed me.
It was based on covering the copper board with photopolymer daylight resin as the etch resist but the 'clever' part was using an LCD panel as the transparency.
The LCD panel was stripped down to its basic element and used to display the board track layout in the standard manner, simply connected to a PC video output port. The 'backlight' was replaced with UV LEDs to enable the resin to set (of course) and the exposure took only a few seconds.
The finished board looked sharp and clean (after etching) and seemed a very respectable method of production.
Now, with the availability of small HD tablets of extremely high dot pitch I reckon you could do a pretty good board - although I've not tested the practicalities - given LCD pitches of 300dpi they are as good as many matrix printers and potentially 10 thou or better track widths (theoretically as low as 4 thou). Certainly the old tablet I have (1920x1080 on a 7-inch display) would be ideal for eurocard sized pcbs (160mm x 100mm).
The only downside (small) is the cost of the 3D resin but given the tiny, tiny amounts used a single bottle would go a long, long way.
I've not seen this method before but was impressed by the results. It adds to the many ways of home manufacture of pcbs that I've seen.
It was based on covering the copper board with photopolymer daylight resin as the etch resist but the 'clever' part was using an LCD panel as the transparency.
The LCD panel was stripped down to its basic element and used to display the board track layout in the standard manner, simply connected to a PC video output port. The 'backlight' was replaced with UV LEDs to enable the resin to set (of course) and the exposure took only a few seconds.
The finished board looked sharp and clean (after etching) and seemed a very respectable method of production.
Now, with the availability of small HD tablets of extremely high dot pitch I reckon you could do a pretty good board - although I've not tested the practicalities - given LCD pitches of 300dpi they are as good as many matrix printers and potentially 10 thou or better track widths (theoretically as low as 4 thou). Certainly the old tablet I have (1920x1080 on a 7-inch display) would be ideal for eurocard sized pcbs (160mm x 100mm).
The only downside (small) is the cost of the 3D resin but given the tiny, tiny amounts used a single bottle would go a long, long way.
I've not seen this method before but was impressed by the results. It adds to the many ways of home manufacture of pcbs that I've seen.
