Reply with QuoteThose printers print on specially coated CDs which has a paperlike texture to it. Doubt it will work on the copper layer
Printer for PCB ?
I know there are a varity of ways of creating PCB boards. Has anyone tried using a CDROM printer like this one to print the traces on copper?
http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...0737&pfp=srch1
Look like it could work.
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Wayne Hill
Those printers print on specially coated CDs which has a paperlike texture to it. Doubt it will work on the copper layer
Stupid questions make me smarter...
See how smart I've become at www.9w2bsr.com ;-P
I tried with a Casio CW-50 and didnt worked
Pablo
How did teachers in school print color overhead projector transparences? Those printers should work then. I don't think they had color laser printers.
Dennis
Were they not just an inkjet transparency which is actually rough to hold the ink until it dries and then printed in a normal inkjet printer as the transparency is flexible? I don't believe there is a special tranparency printer.
If someone could come up with a method of making laser printer ink conductive, you could easily lay down a copper layer on top. Print on paper, tranfer(via ironing) onto insulating board, then copper plate.
Well laser printer is transferred inside a printer by using a voltage of several hundred volts to charge the particles so they are attracted to the drum to be transferred onto the paper and heated to fuse it into the paper, what would be good is an adapted laser printer that can put the toner straight onto copper but I doubt that would work because of the processes involved.
Otherwise what about dye sublimation printers as used for things such as coated ceramics, mouse pads etc... not sure if this would give an etch resist layer or not.
Ben
This may be a bit simplistic, but if you are looking to apply a resist straight to copper clad what about using an old pen plotter? I imagine some mods will be necessary but it shouldn't be to bad. Or what about an old inkjet printer that's been modified to feed a PCB straight through?
I've been trying to work up a DIY PCB mill from old printer, scanner, photocopier parts but the only printers people are giving up are wimpy injets. I'm thinking I might try to be slick and basically make my own etch resist plotter with 2 fixed gantries. The first would have the etch resist pen and the second a drill for drilling the holes. The hardest part would be making sure all the holes were drilled in the right spots since I would be basically working backwards with the drill.
Pen plotters have been used by people and there is at least one yahoo group dedicated to this what a lot of them do though is coat a board completely with an etch resist and then use a blade in the plotter to scratch out between the tracks revealing the copper so that once it is etched this just is eaten away similar result to issolation milling.
I don't think standard inkjet ink is going to dry successfully without running on a copper clad board maybe if the board was warmed to strat with?
Ben
I have tried various pens in my machine to simply draw the tracks onto copper and the hardest thing is to keep the ink flowing at a reasonable pace so the lines are even with no breaks.
Another thought was to spray the ink onto the copper board with something like a inkjet printer head, but using special ink that will resist the etching process.
Last though was using a air driven dispenser unit, I already have one of these that nicely dispenses solder paste using my machine for SMD pcbs.
The nozzles you can get do go down to very fine and the timing solution and variable air pressure is very accurate.
Just sussing out a suitable ink with the correct consistency.
Regards
Sean.
Seems the pcb industry iteself is heading this way:
http://tinyurl.com/9qyse
Solder masks being commonly printed via inkjet and now etch resist a possbility
UV curable inks seem to be a way to go.
Ben
Coming into this thread with my own odd background of elecronics/litho printing/gilding, I am promted to wonder if you could print a simple circuit layout with a laser printer, re-heat the print to soften the resin, then lay down gold leaf over it.
Gold leaf - very thin but a high conductivity. Readily available, not too difficult to use -transfer leaf might work just as well.
- doesn't corrode, solderable, or perhaps glue the component to the printed surface and use silver paste for the final connection to the tracks.
If I can get the old laser going again, I'll give it a try, and post results.
Anyone suggest a test set up that would show that is was as good as traditional copper tracks on a size for size basis ?
The trouble with doing that is what do you print it onto some heavyweight board, thin glass fibre board? if you could come up with a laser printer that could be adjusted for thick material then you could feed a pcb through it and print your etch resist in one go. I've got a couple at work which are knackered for feeding paper and know how to take them apart so I'll have a look when I got some time.
Ben
My idea would be to print onto mylar foil( I think this is what is presently used for transparencies - it has to stand the heat of the fuser unit in the laser).
Then if necessary bond it down to a support. For 'double sided' boards use two layers of foil.
I haven't done this myself, but it does work quite well with some experimentation. It's has been around for a while and basically goes like this;
Print the PCB layout on a laser printer. (Obviously the highest resolution possible)
Place the paper on a cleaned board with the toner side facing the copper.
Use an (clothes) iron to transfer the toner to the copper.
(This is where some experimenting comes in. Temp settings, pressure, etc)
When you are confident the toner has transfered, let it cool and wash off the paper in water.
Etch the board as is!!
Once etched, scrape the toner off (using steel wool if required).
Hey presto.
Problems;
The person who wrote about this technique in a electronics mag years ago did this with a heavy metal plate heated in a BBQ! Why? Prob to avoid warping of the board and movement of paper. But why not use an iron? May take some practice though. Warping may be an issue.
Just what min track size you can get away with is a matter again for experimentation.
My friend made a few boards like this and worked very well.
I used to use a transparancy from an injet or laser with sensitsed board and lamp. Worked OK.
Laser Print (at darkess setting) your art work on a glossy paper (printer paper for color printing is fine) and then iron the printed paper on the PCB will make a good job. Better still, you may buy and use a "Transfer Film or Transfer Paper" from electroninc shop which would make it better.
Just to point out to the last two guys that posted thanks for your input but I think that most people are ware of these methods and we are all just thinking about direct printing to do away with the need to print on a paper and transfer it.
Keep posting guys and thanks for all the good stuff.
I've been tearing through old printers salvaging stepper motors for a CNC project I'm doing. Unfortunately, most of the printers I've been given are old cheap low end inkjets that probably nevery really worked right to begin with. While diggin into one I decided to see if I couldn't get a board to feed through. It was a Cannon BJC100 that I bought years ago that never worked right, probably because of the gravity feed. Once the guts were removed from the unit I noticed that paper could be fed straight through, so I decided to try a piece of FR4 I had sitting on my desk. The small board actually would feed through fairly consitantly with no modification. So with some tweaking my guess is that a working unit could be made to feed the PCB and print perfectly fine.
Like what has been mentioned previously, I guess it really comes down to how to keep the ink on the board where you need it. It was previously suggested that heating the boards durring the process could solve the problem of ink running. One solution for heating would be to make some sort of feed tray to sit the boards in (for running multiple boards) with a heating plate on the bottom with a bit of a delay to make sure the board is up to an acceptable temp. Another, more simple solution might be to only feed one board at a time and to heat the board before it enters and as it exits with some sort of heat lamp or radiated heat source similar to reptile basking bulbs.
Another, approach might be to find a substitute ink that would take to the copper better. You could probably use one of those ink cartridge refill kits and an old empty ink cartridge to substitute the inks. My guess would be that the catch here would finding the proper ink to use and getting ot to the right consistency so that its thin enough to print whithout running/smearing on the board.
I'm actually using the toner transfer method right now, myself. But I would like something a bit more automated since I'm hoping to be doing small production runs of boards in the future.
Last edited by turtlekilroy; 10-04-2005 at 11:34 PM.
the bubblejet printers won't work for this as it uses heat to expel the droplets. You'll need to use a piezo printer. I think epson is the only mainstream manufacturer that uses piezo heads.
I've got to believe that there is a way to lay down a resist directly on copper via inkjet type technology. Maybe UV curing (photo resist??). Maybe lay it down on an intermediate coating on the copper. Maybe a thin 2 part epoxy. Lots of possibilities...
Phil
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