Has anyone tried [this? It’d make a great tutorial!
I’ve also seen quite a bit about laser printer toner transfers for etching. Does anyone do this type of thing with consistant results?
I’d really like to be able to do the whole fab thing myself; Etching, solder masks, silk screens, paste stencils… and anything else I’m yet to discover. :)](Slowing 216.66.8.36&c=1&t=45481.4386354167)
Now [this is what I really want!!! Anyone heard of any conductive inks available for home inkjets?
I’ve done a far bit of googling on this and although I can’t find any inkjet options, there seem to be plenty of options for screen printing with conductive/resistant inks. Anyone have any experience of this?](redirect)
I only use the toner transfer method, and I get reliable results using an HP LaserJet P2015 using inexpensive Tesco’s matte inkjet paper. I make the transfer with a clothes iron at its hottest setting. I’ve made fine pitch SMD boards (0.4mm pitch LQFP) double sided boards (although this fine pitch does require some care). Boards that aren’t so fine pitch can be done very easily - I’ve got consistent results on double sided boards featuring SSOP packages.
It looks like a great project but maybe a little to complex for just creating prototype boards.
Being able to print high-quality silk screens on the top of my home produced PCB’s would be quite handy though 
Some Epson Inkjet printers I have seen have the ability to feed a blank CD or DVD into them and print directly onto the surface, maybe one of these could be used to print silkscreen images onto PCBs…
The toner transfer method seems to be quite popular. Do the various papers that people use give comparable results to the ‘press and peel’ sheets you can buy? I’ve seen quality references like ‘8/8’ or ‘6/6’. What does this mean? I can only think, maybe 8mil track/8mil space???
I don’t have access to a laser printer myself. I could try and get some photocopies from my local librarian though.
konguk:
It looks like a great project but maybe a little to complex for just creating prototype boards.
Yes, these people obviously have too much time on their hands. :lol:
I have an epson r220 with cd tray so it should be quite easy for me to try. Trouble is I can’t find anywhere in the UK (or Europe for that matter) that sells the mis pro inks and I want them NOW. :x If anyone knows of such a supplier, let me know. Any pigment inks would be a start (bottle not cart.)
Until epson release their liquid silicon, conductive and resistive inks for us, I think the most versatile solution must be screen printing. You can print conductive tracks, etche resists, solder masks, solder paste and, of course, silk screens. And when you’ve put it all together, you can even do the merchandise. :lol: I’m not sure how fine you can go though - 8/8, 6/6 and all that. And it does seem to be a bit of a palava.
This kind of reminds me of some of the work that the Fab@Home project has done, specifically with using their fabber to make batteries using special pastes.
I think rapid prototypers and fabbers have the potential to really revolutionize research and building things in general, but some of the issues with low cost systems (like the fab@home project) are the relatively poor spatial resolution, which is probably a result both of the stepper resolution as well as the media resolution, such as nozzle size and related issues. For creating a multilayer pcb with a fabber using conductive and non-conductive inks, I imagine that you would probably have to replace the syringe-style paste dispenser with something like a print nozel (as Epson has done), but the problem with the print nozel is that you’d have to both work out the pinouts, as well as develop some home-brew inks that are both either conductive or non-conductive, as well as relatively rigid once printed.
In that respect I remember two projects: one from HackADay, where a person deciphered the pinout on a print cartridge, connected it to a PIC, and had a portable printer to print on anything – paper, walls, liquids. The other was a project I stumbled upon some time ago where a student attempted to build a 3D printer using a modified inkjet printer and some homebrew ink, but if I remember correctly his prototype didn’t work so well (but it did print out a cube).
I think it would be a neat next step to see the addition of a ‘print head’ tool for the Fab@Home and similar homebrew mill/fabber projects that could use easily available and safely handled conductive and insulating inks to ‘print out’ a homebrew PCB.
Just some thoughts… I realize this is more of a rambling post than anything.
Love these conversations!
After doing a few toner transfer jobs, I know it works well, but there has got to be another way.
Obviously putting a blank piece of fibreglass and printing on a ‘standard’ printer in copper or similar conductive surface would be ideal.
What about some kind of inverse toner transfer method? Print a positive in some sort of “atractant” (as opposed to “resist”) which then attracts conductive material when placed in a solution?
When you tin a board in a tinning solution, it is obviously attracted to the coating. Would it be attracted to some other coating?
Electroless plating can't produce a very thick layer of metal - once you've got a continuous layer, no further reaction can take place. It might be possible to find a series of electroless plating steps, that total up to a usable thickness of metal, but now you've got multiple forms of toxic waste to dispose of once the solutions are used up...trialex:
When you tin a board in a tinning solution, it is obviously attracted to the coating. Would it be attracted to some other coating?
Electroplating can make the traces arbitrarily thick, as long as you compensate for the fact that it’s also making them wider. Also, you need an actual electrical connection to the trace - you’d either have to move a probe around the board, touching each trace in turn (making it rather difficult to get consistent plating thickness), OR have ALL of your traces connected together in areas that could later be cut/drilled out of the board.
trialex:
When you tin a board in a tinning solution, it is obviously attracted to the coating. Would it be attracted to some other coating?
Greetings trialex,
Electrodeless tin coating is a chemical reaction that continues
until the copper is no longer exposed (as Jason points out).
The finish layer is very thin!
In a PCB shop the tin is selectively appled to the raw PCB
copper, using photolithography (the PCB is photosensitized
and exposed with the trace pattern, after exposure the resist
is developed chemically and unexposed photoresist stripped).
This is done after the drilling and PTH (Plated Through Hole)
processes. The tin acts as a resist for the final etching of the
copper. Once the copper is etched the tin is stripped and
replaced with selective solder plating on exposed contacts,
while the solder mask protects the remaining copper traces.
PCB processes vary but in most cases the copper traces under
a solder mask are not plated with solder (or RoHS tin).
Hobby or prototype wet chemistry is quite different and
typically does not include PTH.
Comments Welcome!
Some of the stuff I’ve been reading is, frankly, unbelievable! All sorts of things have been printed using inkjets: 20 layer circuits, transistors, logic circuits, batteries, speakers… McDonalds even printed an electronic game on a kids fun sheet (paper). Still far too limiting to be considered worth while for the average electronics enthusiasts, though.
The most promising idea I’ve read for directly printing a pcb was from a guy who converted an old dot matrix printer and used spark erosion to remove the copper in 3mil steps.
Has anyone tried sticky back copper? You could run this stuff through your printer and then just stick it to a board for curing/etching. Saves breaking your printer apart.
Marctwo:
Some of the stuff I’ve been reading is, frankly, unbelievable! All sorts of things have been printed using inkjets: 20 layer circuits, transistors, logic circuits, batteries, speakers… McDonalds even printed an electronic game on a kids fun sheet (paper). Still far too limiting to be considered worth while for the average electronics enthusiasts, though.
You think that’s amazing, check out what Intel just did:
[<LINK_TEXT text=“ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs … pends1.png”>ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs</LINK_TEXT>
<LINK_TEXT text=“http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9 … 29749.html”>http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html</LINK_TEXT>
Crazy, I know! :roll:](http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html)
reklipz:
You think that’s amazing, check out what Intel just did:
Hmmm… It wasn’t exactly printed on an inkjet though, was it. I mean, that’s not really something we could all do at home, given the right inks.
reklipz:
Marctwo:
Some of the stuff I’ve been reading is, frankly, unbelievable! All sorts of things have been printed using inkjets: 20 layer circuits, transistors, logic circuits, batteries, speakers… McDonalds even printed an electronic game on a kids fun sheet (paper). Still far too limiting to be considered worth while for the average electronics enthusiasts, though.You think that’s amazing, check out what Intel just did:
[<LINK_TEXT text=“ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs … pends1.png”>ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs</LINK_TEXT>
<LINK_TEXT text=“http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9 … 29749.html”>http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html</LINK_TEXT>
Crazy, I know! :roll:[/quote]
You’re joking, right? You posted a link to Tom’s Hardware (non-biased, BTW) about a upcoming chip. What does this have to do with this thread? The chip is not literally made on paper, it only exists on paper. Do a Google search on “Paper Tiger”.](http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html)
Yes, that was intended to be a joke, thought someone might get a laugh out of it.
My bad!
I couldn’t tell if you were joking or not and it seemed that Marctwo was talking you seriously.
