printed circuit board pcb etching


Posted on Feb 4, 2014

This post assumes some knowledge of PCB etching methods and is an account of my experience with the toner transfer method. If this is new to you, you may have to get Googling on a few of things mentioned here. That said, I`ve linked to the sites I found most useful during the process. It`s a fairly straightforward process to build the circuit on a


printed circuit board pcb etching
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

piece of protoboard, and for an Electric Window 3 circuit, it takes about two hours. The bottleneck of this process is preparing all the connecting wires (shown in white in the above photo) and ensuring all the interconnections are correct, ie, connecting the right components to the right pins of the microprocessor and the power and ground points. For our recent contribution to the Chinatown Remixed exhibition, Deb and I (working as The Latest Artists ) envisioned a series of Electric Window 3 light boxes, displaying various animations along with text from Twitter via a wireless internet connection. I decied to use this as an opportunity to finally learn how to etch PCBs. There seemed to be a steep learning curve, as I`d yet to use electronic CAD software such as Eagle, and the actual etchning process seemed finicky and messy. After watching Collin`s video, a few others on YouTube, and reading some on-line tutorials (found via Google), I decided to attempt etching with the toner transfer method, since I already have a laser printer and clothes iron. I knew I`d be creating a single-sided board for the sake of simplicity, so I created a rough layout by hand ” based on my existing hand-drawn schematic (not shown) ” to get an idea of where the components should best be and which microprocessor pins were best to avoid crossing wires and/or requring jumpers: While there are plenty of software alternatives, free and otherwise,...




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