Making Circuit Boards with a Laser Cutter
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 พ.ค. 2018
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Link to laser etch eagle DRC file: itkindaworks.com/laserSet02.dru
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You did a great job of explaining your process in layman's terms. Keep up with your instructive videos.
I've ordered my laser engraver, just waiting for delivery, I like this video, well documented .
Just reading the comment regarding that it's easier to order from a PCB company, , any problems with the board, or I've missed something, not only can I remedy the board, but also the blame is on me. Everyone at sometime makes mistakes, or missed out something silly or crucial, you've now paid for the boards, but you've got to pay and wait again for delivery..
Maybe the boards at $2 ( I'm UK so that's about £1.56 at present), it all adds up.
Not only that, but I get the satisfaction that I've made the board myself, from the start to finish. I've done the laser toner way, UV resist boars with tracing paper, and also the 'yellow' laser toner, I'm now hoping to use the engraver to see what realty I get, the ways I've said, I've always had excellent results. Thank you if you've read this..
It can be used as an optocoupler, photointerupter, smoke or particle detector, IR transparency meter, and God knows what else
Congratulations! Great job. Really interesting method.
Excellent Job!! I would like learn more about PCB
If you use kiCad to design your pcb (which is free), you can save your pcb file to SVG directly, and while you could just turn off holes in the pcb making process in the software, the holes are actually saved separately from the traces in the SVG. So, you can move the traces out the way, and delete all the holes in one go. Personally, I prefer to have tiny holes that can be used to help center the bit on the pad, and act as pilots holes for drilling.
Basically, if you set the software up the way you want, you can save as SVG, open in inkscape, remove the fill, change the stroke to red, and you're done.
It’s a optical end stop. Great video. Thanks
That is a lot of steps for something that should be simple! Thank you
Whoever told you that lasers and/or PCBs were easy was lying to you... LYING I SAY!
A lot of steps that once completed are perfectly repeatable and scalable. In some ways, one offs are faster to make but making more of the same thing is a different thing altogether.
Great video. Thanks
Nice video
Is the matt black paint any special formula or just any old paint will do?
Amazing channel..
Thanks for sharing :-)
To remove the lasered paint, I had much better results using Lestoil (a household cleaner with petroleum distillates) & household ammonia instead of isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol). I first rub Lestoil on the board (undiluted) and gently rub MOST of the unwanted paint off. Then I use another clean cotton swap or brush to apply more Lestoil over the board (don't wipe off the Lestoil), then rub straight ammonia over the board to remove the rest of the paint. The Lestoil and ammonia combination (mixture) will remove the rest of the lasered paint. I use Rustoleum Matte black Custom Shop spray paint. I'm able to get a resolution of .1 mm (razor sharp)! Had no issues of accidentally removing UNLASERED paint, like I had with alcohol. I use a 5 watt laser set at 80% power @ 750mm/sec (travel time). After etching, you can use denatured alcohol or acetone to remove the paint, denatured alcohol being less volatile.
Great video tnx
Very nice result! I wish you could show us some double sided créations.
I would love to! I have some double sided boards but I have yet to figure out a workflow for etching them.
a hole or two as a guide in repositioning the laser when flipping the board.
Very good! I have a few questions:
1) Could the spray you painted the PCB be any black paint?
2) I didn't understand why to use Ferric Chloride, as the PCB was excavated with the laser! (I'm certainly wrong!)
3) Was acetone used to remove the ink from the PCB?
Thanks
1) Any black paint
2) The laser only removed the ink, exposing what needs to be etched
3) Any ink remover will do - ask for that on your hardware store!
you should consider buying dry film solder mask to protect your copper and to make soldering easier since it wont bleed over to the rest of the copper.
or cleaning only the pads...
Looks like I have something else to try on my laser. I started with a Diode in 2019 and then 3 months later moved to a K40...I did upgrade to a Mini-GRBL so I could use Lightburn. Then a year after that, I moved to a OmTech AF2435-80w. I never knew Lasers could do this. Where did you get your copper sheet?
is that going to be a RPM signal meter. So something will spin in between that and trigger an ON/OFF state?
Great job...My K40 moves side to side and top to bottom. Can you explain what you did to get the K40 to follow the trace? I assume this would create a much better finished design, no pieces of copper left behind.
You need to convert your pcb from an image to a vector. Then it can be "cut" like any other shape that you cut with your laser
Pro tip: When you have etched the copper away it’s easy to cut the board using the laser, so you don’t have to use a hacksaw or drill to make less than perfect cuts.
This type of laser don't cut the PCB. You need fiber laser to do that
If you have a mechanics vice, clamp the board in that, then the cut across the board which will be a straight line, then all you need to do is sand the edges smooth?
@@brunocabral1578 This laser can cut the PCB since the copper layer is etched out. But my attempt says that the cuts are not pretty. I can cut the thin brown PCB but the FR4 light green PCB, no luck.
Using KiCAD helps removing Photoshop from the equation, but is a back and forth a couple of times.
The K40 laser cutter, a great little worker for the money once modded. Thanks for sharing, handy info. What mods do you have on your K40?
I've modded just about everything save for the laser tube/power supply and the axis. The fans, motion controller, safety switches, air assist, lens, etc have all been added/modded. Took about a year to really get all of those changes done but yeah it's a wonderful machine
@@ItKindaWorks Do you have any video on your air assist mod?
Would a cermark metal marking spray be an easier method?
I have used the acid method for over ten years now and have success 100% of the time. But this is interesting.
This still uses acid. The laser cutter just draws the image for you.
Can you suggest some other option to clean the laser burnt paint from the PCB? IPA cannot remove all the debris and leaves a black outline around the traces.
Thank u for the video,
I tried this with my 5.5w engraver but there is a thin layer of ink still on the pads which is hardly to remove without damaging the traces, I tried too much to adjust the focus and I think it is adjusted well, do I need to use a higher power laser or there is something wrong with my work?
You need more power (other laser). Or repeat 3-4 passes
It's an optocupler
Photo switch. No solder mask? Nice technique.
Congrats for the video!
What is the power of your laser engraver? I could not remove the ink with a 500mW Laser...
Looks like a K40 laser, mening 40W, cost is 3-400 usd
Do you have any progress on that? I've read ppl using as low as 25mW. I did buy a 500mW laser to try this...
@@brunocabral1578 I had no improvements. I guess that a 5W laser would be enough for this job, but I didn't tried yet.
Is 500mw not enough please
@@brunocabral1578 are the 500mw laser work with that please
When you say on minimum power at 5mm/sec do you know roughly what wattage that is? Would you be able to do the same with a 2.5W or 5W laser? Either by repeating the gcode or going slower (I think this would reduce accuracy due to heat buildup).
By minimum power, I mean my laser registers maybe 3ish watts (though admittedly the meter isn't very accurate but it gives you an idea). I would imagine that with a 5W laser you would definitely be able to do it without too much issue.
Could you please inform me about the laser module you are utilizing? I have a 1000mW module, but it seems unable to burn through the layer of splay color.
Good night friend what happens if I use another type of spray paint that does not krylon?
the machine would also draw the circuit?
Sure, it's just matt black paint, because matt black absorbs the IR laser better and thus burns away more cleanly...
@@cescoaiel5336 people say you can use sandable prime too
I read somewhere that you don't need spray ink, just paint the board with a pencil marker, the one used to write on CDs
Instead of using a saw, I use a guillotine paper cutter. Did you try to etch without cleaning first?
The paint that is burned by the laser leaves a deposit (of paint ash?) on the copper. This residue sticks to the board and does not blow away, even if you're using air-assist. You need to wash it off with something that won't soften the remaining paint (the mask). The ash actually needs a bit of rubbing, to get it all off, hence the cotton-bud to "scrub" it gently and not damage the desired paint.
Just wondering, have you tried to print the pads and use the laser to remove the pads and use the painted board as a solder mask?
Yes I have - my laser is not accurate enough at speed in scanning mode to make clean boards that way. A larger/better laser cutter could probably etch in this way though.
Why you don't engrave Black color filled area. I've checked and it works better. It's even possible engrave top layer of etched pcb
This is a photo interrupter.
Good day:
I want to know if it is compatible with the "FlatCam 8.5" software or some version of it, Thank you.
Best regards
You can generate the gcode with flatcam and replace G? Z commands with M3 and M5 to turn on and off the laser, but the real question is - is the K40 capable of accept gcode directly? I don't have one to answer that
Hi, what is black spray? dont dissolved in FeCl3? I should cut at least 0.2mm of brass into the acid without dissolving it
black spray is just ink that you buy on hardware store
Tell me please what is the power of a laser?
And how many percent of laser power do you use to make a this PCB?
Thanks,
The laser that I have is a 40W laser but I only run it at the minimal laser power (the dial isnt too precise at the low end but 1-2W)
Bro Ferric chloride is dangerous or not? And what equipments i need for this
Hi,
I tried to burn the black nail polishing with my 1.6W laser on the pcb but it didn't work, Can you help me?
thanks.
Wave Length: 450nm
Output Power: 1.6W
You don't like SMD stuff? No need to drill holes with SMD 👍. You can even get SMD pin headers.
If you really wanna, you can probably use through-hole parts turned onto their side & use solder to kinda "glue" them onto the surface like an SMD part, yeah?
Since you are using holes - I'm surprised you deleted the holes from the etch. AFAIK they can help align the drillbit, but maybe that works better with a hand-held drill (ie: dremel).
Good video but why wouldn't you etch off most of the copper and leave just the traces and pads?
Is this method accurate enough for SMD?
what ink you use to cover the pcb (black inc).
Just regular hardware store matte black spray paint. You want a good even but thin coating. I tend to waste some of the spray paint by holding it really far back but it seems to do the trick.
Nice result, but quite sad to see that small sliver of copper residing between the tracks. It might become dislodged and short out. Isn't there a way to have the laser overlap?
It just takes fine tuning. With even more practice I've been able to basically eliminate those tiny slivers. It just comes down to the focus of the laser and how wide the distance between traces is in Eagle.
how about processing the file not as vectors but as image to engrave? most laser software have this feature so that would get ride of the unwanted copper.
Can I make with the laser conductor tracks that are 0,3 mm wide?
0.3 might be a stretch to make reliably but given enough patience with laser focus and power level I imagine you could get close to that. I generally make 0.9mm traces these days though I could definitely go a bit smaller down to around .5 if I wanted to. It all depends upon your machine and calibration
I've gone to the link provided for the 'dru' file, but i always get 'unreachable' . Is there another url or way to download this file please ?
Sorry i meant ' drc '
Why don’t you drill the pad holes with the laser. A fiberglass pcb isn’t all that thick.
do you think 15watt laser engraver can give the same result?
Given that I used basically the minimum power setting of my 40W laser, I would say yes! :) The way I dialed things in was to fire the laser and get it to the minimum power so that the moment I test fire it, the paint vaporized and there is a flash from the copper. If it is any higher than the minimum power to flash away the paint, the cut line starts to enlarge and can "eat into" your trace widths. I sometimes even do 2 passes with the if it seems like its not flashing the paint completely away on my low setting rather than turn it up to something higher.
I can etch paint on my 2.5W one, so probably yes.
@@ItKindaWorks
Thank you for sharing your experience 😊💕
@@satibel
Thank you for sharing your experience 💞☺️
you didn't mention the power used, or maximum laser power, even though you used minimum power. (percentage of max power)
the laser just burned / etched the paint and you still had to use FeCl4 to etch the copper.
Try using solder mask, you have a laser, you can make a stencil.
Soldering a complex circuit board with 0402 components will be a pain in the ass...
You would need something extremely powerful to cut through the copper directly, but that much energy would damage the substrate. On top of that copper is really good conductor, so the heat needed to burn away the copper would dissipate to where you don't want to burn, and the fine details would just turn sloppy.
Have you thought in smd laying the components, apply solder past and use the laser to burn the solder?
misleading title :)
Would it be possible to use raster to clear out large areas of spraypaint?
I think the biggest problem with this is aligning two layers, do you think theres a viable way of making sure that the top and bottom layers are aligned.
pretty cool project, a friend of mine is always trying to find better ways of doing the photoresist.
Haha I didn’t really think it was too misleading. I’m using laser etching for part of it ;)
My idea is to both make a board holding jig that I can clamp into and secondly to possibly use register pins to align the board.
For rastering, I tried it before and never got good results... also it uses less etchant this way
Arnþór Gíslason the best way to align is using fiducial holes,so you use pins to align the pcb into a base, do all your work in one side, flip the board and then do the botton layer, so must to be sure your holder/base won't move during the entire process.
Cant the laser cutter just "cut" away all the excess copper ? Why do you need to etch anything afterwards ?
Thats exactly what I tried at first but when the power was turned up, the laser just ended up destroying the board. It would 'cut' through the copper but really it just left a huge mess in it's path. I'm not sure if it's because my laser isnt powerful enough to just vaporize the copper or if it's just not really possible but thats been my experience.
I would surmise this would be caused by copper being very good at dissipating heat. The net result being a large area will be heated before it can be vaporised, losing all accuracy of using the laser and as you said leaving a huge mess in it's path. :-)
Doesn't your laser cutter understand Gcode ?
Would be a lot easier, export board as gerber, and use Flatcam (free/OpS) to convert it to Gcode without the hassle over converting inch/PIXEL/mm.
My grooves are only 50 microns (good for smd), but need multi-passes to remove a bit more copper (thanks Flatcam for this function). What resolution do you get?
Edit: 300mm/min is pretty fast, against my 1mm/sec. ;-)
The K40 Whisperer software does do gcode. I would suggest pcb-gcode plugin, though. It's a one step export from Eagle. Doesn't have all the features of flatcam, but you don't need it with the laser.
Do you recomend any video on using flatcam to laser etch? I like it's gerber load capabilities
ir receiver/ emitter
This seems like a lot of work. On GreatScott's channel, he always promotes going to a website and ordering your 10 custom made boards for around $2. I think it would be less of a hassle to order them. They may be worse quality but who knows.
It’s totally true that you can get them for cheap and easy online but usually those super cheap board shops take 3+ weeks to ship and that’s a long time wait for a potentially wrong board. This is more for super rapid prototyping
Where can u order boards for 2 bucks?
The $2 boards are from JLCPCB, it doesn't include shipping (but shipping is also pretty cheap TBH).
If you're designing boards with EasyEDA, it'll give a link to a quote from JLCPCB when your download the gerber files.
Just saying the same thing is IKWs. Takes a long time for Chinese PCB's to come in and when you just have a funky chip you want to test, it's pretty quick to etch a tiny board. I hardly etch boards anymore, but when I need them, it's nice to have.
This is a complement to that.
You do the prototype with this method. And if it works and you need more copies, you get the pcbs made.
This is a great method for "one of".
Doesn't the cutter cut the board itself?
I tried that at first but either it wouldn't cut or I'd end up blowing out the board and make heavy black lines everywhere. Yeah I know it would be more ideal to be able to just do all of the etching with the laser cutter but given that all of my attempts at toner transfer in the past have been nothing but a pain, I'm pretty happy with this.
When you say you tried it before, did you try cutting the board in an area where there was still copper? I would think that if you etched away the border of the board, and then cut through the bare phenolic, it should cut fairly cleanly..depending on the laser, I guess.
Hi! Is it a CO2 laser cutter??
Yes
Did you use a specific spraypaint?
I think the stuff I use is just krylon matte black but I've used a few different kinds in the past. I don't think the brand really matters but the best color for me has been matte black.
@@ItKindaWorks what happen if you dont use the paint ?
@@HectorDC02 the laser reflects and you really don't wan't that
Won't the laser "etch" the copper off the board? It would be nice if you didn't have to etch the board after laser!!
To make the copper vaporize a much stronger laser is needed, also it needs to be the correct wavelength for the copper to absorb the light.
You kept mentioning your "Laser Cutter", but you didn't do any cutting. With a 40 watt laser like that, you could have turned the board over and pre-drilled all the holes and pre-cut the board outline (short of penetrating the copper). It would have been easy to follow with a drill to finish the holes and you would have been far more accurate.
infared emitter/detector.
I do no why Chinese still use phoresist layer method ? ., if i see pretty mach result
Finer resolution lines possible, and shining a UV light through a mask for a few seconds is much faster than carving out etchant dot-by-dot.
Optical sensor
still needs acid >.< the whole thign I'm trying to do is avoid the acid! otherwise a laser printer has worked just fine for me
Get a desktop cnc and mill it.
if you don't have any kind of cnc, there's always the manual version, use an xacto knife to cut the copper.
another one would be using a dremel with a fine conical tip.
HCL plus H2O2, or alcohol vinager plus pharmacy's hydrogen peroxide 40 vol plus salt
@@brunocabral1578 That's not avoiding acid, that's just using a different acid!! He's talking about using laser ablation of the copper. That needs very high power lasers and is apparently pretty dangerous from a fume standpoint. I believe they are in the kW power and use pulsed lasers to get the energy density up.
But. Cnc milling machine is best then
How much power do you need to cut the PCB and punch the holes in it ?
less than you'd think. But also you're going to have a charred time so probably not worth it.
Smoke detector
Optical Encoder
you right!
I was thinking you'd be able to just use the laser cutter to vaporize the copper and leave the board unharmed. I suppose more power would be needed for that.
sadly even with more power this would be very difficult. In my experience the amount of power needed to cut the copper would be so large that it also destroys the underlying fibreglass substrate. I've tried and it always ends up as a mess of charred fiberboard and chunks of melted copper.
I'm not sure how this helps us, iiit seems like it's was just an opportunity to show off your toys. Most of us are still gonna be using toner., which kinda works..
Слишком много действий
It's always easy when you possess expensive toys like laser
Oh, okay. It doesn't cut anything. Title is a little misleading, it must be: Making Circuit Boards negatives with a Laser Cutter. The process still need chemicals and that is what I want to avoid.