27C3: File - Print - Electronics

Abstract
Are you ready to wake up from the cult of Arduino? Tired of plugging together black-box pre-built modules like a mindless drone, copying and pasting in code you found on Hackaday? You've soldered together your TV-Be-Gone, built your fifth Minty Boost, and your bench is awash with discarded Adafruit packaging and Make magazines. It's time to stop this passive consumption. It's time to create something that is truly yours. It's time, my friend, to design your first circuit board. And you'll need a machine to print it.
Description
Outsourcing printed circuit board (PCB) manufacture can be expensive and slow. You want your board now, for free. And designing PCB's is hard. You'll make mistakes, and some boards will be wasted. You can etch your own PCB's at home but the process is fiddly, and notoriously difficult to perfect. What if you had a printer that could make PCB's? A rapid prototyping machine for circuit boards.

In this talk I will present my progress towards an inexpensive PCB printer by reverse engineering Epson inkjet technology. And I'm not talking about the crappy print-and-bake method you might have seen on the internet. Come and learn about the miracle of microfluidics within the modern consumer inkjet printer, and how to push it to do new, exciting things. I'll be describing some reverse engineering techniques, a bit of electronics circuit design and the potential for 3D microfabrication with inkjet technology.

A PCB will be printed and etched live, on stage, at 27C3!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• yt:stretch=16:9

[dbenzhuser]

Start @8:00

[esoterik0]

what i don't understand is why he didn't put the printer back together, and let the printer and the driver handle the print head control? He could then hack the printer to feed flat.

[cipriuss]

does anybody know how to get in touch with the person from the video?

He had done the exact same thing I was trying to do, he succeeded and I was not

[cipriuss]

does anybody know how to get in touch with the person from the video?

[techpops]

I could see it being fairly easy once the wax has been printed to push the board into the chemical bath. Sort of making it a one step process. The printer already has elements to aid this.

Really interesting presentation. Can't wait to see where this goes in the future

[mysteryMachinePL]

Cool but he is not a first person that used phaser to make nice pcb-s, some "kamikaze" even used gelspriter to make easy and fast pcb. But when we speak about price - Modified GBC HeatSeal is still best choice to make nice, even A3 format pcb.

[ghesil]

excelent

[philbotification]

huh. i just stick a blank bord from radio shack into my cnc machine and just carefully set the depth and let it do the rest

[youritronics]

I've also written a tutorial on how to etch your own pcb's using the photo etching method a while ago.. just google for "DIY Printed Circuit Board Using Photo Etching Method"