5 ms·

How to make PCBs at home in 1 hour without special materials

131 points by ph0rque 18y ago

ejs 18y ago
I used to make boards like this all the time. Its often easier just to buy a pack of paper made for the transfer purpose (such as http://www.techniks.com/ http://www.techniks.com/) since you know it will work. If you use ferric chloride really take heed to the part about staining clothing, seems to always end up ruining some clothing so make sure to wear crappy stuff. There is also a problem doing them the way he has done... if you use pads that are filled (as they are there) it can be difficult to drill the holes if using through-hole components. The drill bit will walk, or just bend because its so thin... using pads with holes in the middle makes it much easier. If you have a bigger board it becomes really annoying, especially if you have ICs with a lot of pins... they wont line up well.
- shiro 18y ago
  Agreed on every accounts. I didn't make PCBs by myself anymore, but to me the messiest part was dealing with ferric chloride, so I expected this article to present some ways to avoid that material... Putting the mask on the copper surface was easier part (with that regards, the article presents a cool way to do it, though).
- ph0rque 18y ago
  Supposedly, you can substitute ferric chloride with hydrogen peroxide and muriatic acid: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-etchant!--A-better-etc/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-e...
  - kragen 18y ago
    When I read your comment, I thought, “Holy shit, he wants to use H₂O₂ because FeCl₃ is dangerous? Talk about ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire!’” but the Instructable you linked to just uses the standard 3% H₂O₂ USP solution, which isn't particularly dangerous.
ComputerGuru 18y ago
Beautiful article - just in time for me to prototype my graduation project. Personally, I prefer the extremely time-consuming method of building the very first prototype on a perfboard w/ wire-wrap; just because it gives me the flexibility of changing connections then-and-there as I attempt to get a working design and only then convert to PCB.
erlanger 18y ago
I saw the title and was hoping a PCB was something explosive :(
- mattchew 18y ago
  I was wondering why anyone would want to make polychlorinated biphenyls at home.
  - blackguardx 18y ago
    Yeah, just buy some really old capacitors or transformers and drain that cancer-inducing goodness out.
  - blahblahblah 18y ago
    That was the first thought that popped into my head upon reading the title. That's the problem with acronyms - namespace collisions occur far too frequently (and it's even worse in this case because both variants of PCB are used within the same technical domain). Fortunately, the authors at least bothered to define the term at the point when it is first used in the text (as is standard practice in science literature). There's nothing quite so annoying as encountering a blog full of alphabet soup that makes no attempt to define abbreviations properly.
mhb 18y ago
Save yourself a lot of time, trouble and dealing with nasty chemicals and take a look at http://www.apcircuits.com/ http://www.apcircuits.com/ or http://www.pcb-pool.com/ppuk/index.html http://www.pcb-pool.com/ppuk/index.html. I've used them both with excellent results. Other people have also been happy with http://www.expresspcb.com/ http://www.expresspcb.com/ which offers free layout software.
- blackguardx 18y ago
  mhb is right. This may look easy, but is actually a pain in the ass. It is fine for small circuits, like in the example. For big projects, drilling out all the vias or thru-holes is tedious. There are also registration issues and etch time issues. There is a reason why commercially made prototype circuit boards are so popular.
- zaius 18y ago
  Agreed. If you're doing one tiny board, save the effort and use veroboard. For anything above that, get it printed.
wyday 18y ago
What are the advantages of homemade PCB boards over wire-wrap? Is compactness the only advantage?
- blackguardx 18y ago
  Wire wrap creates a huge tangle of wires that is hard to debug. With careful PCB layout, you can create circuits that operate at microwave frequencies due to the lower parasitics. Wire wrap circuits can't operate at high frequencies. There is too much series inductance and cross-coupling. Also, chips are increasingly moving towards surface mount only packaging. By the way, where are you getting your wire wrap supplies? I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years.
  - wyday 18y ago
    > I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years. I just use a manual wire-wrap/stripping tool (from digikey.com). I'm a software guy who dabbles in hardware, hence the arcane technology.
    - blackguardx 18y ago
      They are pretty good for that. Honestly, if you didn't want to go through the trouble to get a PCB fabbed by a commercial PCB vendor, wire wrap is a pretty good choice for simple circuits. When I do that simple stuff like that, I use wires and solder instead of a wire wrap tool. Wire wrap might be a little faster. If you want to prototype high speed analog/RF circuits without PCBs, take a look at "dirty" or "dead-bug" construction. HAM guys love it for building radios. You assemble your circuit over a piece of bare copper-clad board and solder the pins either directly together or short pieces of wire. People do this with both SMT and thru-hole parts. Jim Williams has a great tutorial on this technique: http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C1154,C1009,C1028,P1219,D4138 http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C11...
  - dfox 18y ago
    But designing microwave PCBs requires significant effort, interesting feature of wirewrap is that it tends to work without careful layout to suprisingly high frequencies (~10MHz) that would start to require careful design for PCBs. Getting wirewrap guns or wire probably isn't much of problem but what I cannot find for reasonable prices are wirewrap boards.
waratuman 18y ago
This is amazing, wish I would have know how to do this before I made my microcomputer board. I ordered mine from 4pcb.com, but making it yourself is pretty sweet. Whenever I do something myself, it adds a lot of extra meaning to what I did.
Steve0 18y ago
The premise was very cool, Mc Gyver style. But let's be honest, who has ferric chloride solution in their kitchen cabinet?
- dfox 18y ago
  I have :)
fsilva 18y ago
There is also lots of information in this page http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/index.html http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/i... about an alternative to ferric cloride, acid cupric cloride. It is easier to buy, since all you are doing is mixing 2 parts oxygenated water with 1 part muriatic acid/HCl (@33%), which can be obtained at any hardware store. It shares the same problem with Ferric Cloride: after etching, the resulting solution is hazardous and should be disposed accordingly (€€/$$). I've done this at home just like the original article but with this other solution and after 3-4 tries got pretty good results. Good enough for some basic SMD circuits.
- sokoloff 18y ago
  Can you actually get muriatic acid at "any hardware store" nowadays? I'm 0 for 4 on 3 Home Depots and 1 Lowes in eastern MA.
  - fsilva 18y ago
    I'm in Portugal so I can't comment on your experience. In here one can get it at any 'mom&pop' hardware store, which are more common than 'Home Depot' style stores.
Alex3917 18y ago
Sounds like a good way to turn your house into a superfund site.
mucachino 18y ago
This might be interesting for the reprap project, or?
- ph0rque 18y ago
  Actually, RepRap is moving towards (literally) printing their circuit boards using both conductive and insulative materials.
apstuff 18y ago
Tom Gootee's article is worth reading. He did a lot of the heavy lifting summarized in this article. I've tried this and it works -- but... You must be very, very careful with the solution -- whether it's Ferric Chloride from Radio Shack or a muriatic/peroxide homebrew. Gootee's article and others show how to create safe 'bubblers' for this step. Look at these first. Please be careful. You are entering 'Breaking Bad' territory here.
asciilifeform 18y ago
Unless your ironing technique is exceedingly thorough and your boards perfectly smooth, you will get pitted/broken traces. I found that the more traditional photographic method is just as quick, and the supplies cost approximately the same.
diN0bot 18y ago
how important are thru-holes? my friends and i are making a cheap desktop circuitboard miller. it mills away the copper with a blade rather than etching. it can do both sides of the board in series, but no thru-holes. is this something anyone would be interested in?
proee 18y ago
True Story: My first experience in making PCB's didn't go so well. I was in junior high and just started getting into electronics because I was obsessed with the dream of creating my own car-audio amps (think Kicker, JBL, etc). Note I was way to young for even a driver's license but that didn't stop me from planning out for when I was old enough to roll (aka Weird Al - White & Nerdy) Anyway, I created my first PCB in autocad and took it out into the garage for etching... "Hmmm I needed something to pour the etching acid into... Something that I could throw away when I'm done... Ah! This pie tin will work out nicely!" So I took the pie tin and placed it on the surface of my Dad's table saw and then placed my unetched PCB in the tin. Then next step of course was to pour the acid in the tin...... $%^&!!!!! The acid reacted violently with the metal of the tin and within seconds the bottom of the tin was completed digested by the acid which then proceeded to flow out of the tin, onto the table saw, and then all over the garage floor. To this day, the table saw still has a rusty look to it and there is a nice brown stain in the concrete. My career as a "EE" was founded on pure genius!

131 points by ph0rque 18y ago

ejs 18y ago

I used to make boards like this all the time. Its often easier just to buy a pack of paper made for the transfer purpose (such as http://www.techniks.com/ http://www.techniks.com/) since you know it will work. If you use ferric chloride really take heed to the part about staining clothing, seems to always end up ruining some clothing so make sure to wear crappy stuff. There is also a problem doing them the way he has done... if you use pads that are filled (as they are there) it can be difficult to drill the holes if using through-hole components. The drill bit will walk, or just bend because its so thin... using pads with holes in the middle makes it much easier. If you have a bigger board it becomes really annoying, especially if you have ICs with a lot of pins... they wont line up well.

shiro 18y ago
Agreed on every accounts. I didn't make PCBs by myself anymore, but to me the messiest part was dealing with ferric chloride, so I expected this article to present some ways to avoid that material... Putting the mask on the copper surface was easier part (with that regards, the article presents a cool way to do it, though).
ph0rque 18y ago
Supposedly, you can substitute ferric chloride with hydrogen peroxide and muriatic acid: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-etchant!--A-better-etc/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-e...
- kragen 18y ago
  When I read your comment, I thought, “Holy shit, he wants to use H₂O₂ because FeCl₃ is dangerous? Talk about ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire!’” but the Instructable you linked to just uses the standard 3% H₂O₂ USP solution, which isn't particularly dangerous.

ComputerGuru 18y ago

Beautiful article - just in time for me to prototype my graduation project. Personally, I prefer the extremely time-consuming method of building the very first prototype on a perfboard w/ wire-wrap; just because it gives me the flexibility of changing connections then-and-there as I attempt to get a working design and only then convert to PCB.

erlanger 18y ago

I saw the title and was hoping a PCB was something explosive :(

mattchew 18y ago
I was wondering why anyone would want to make polychlorinated biphenyls at home.
- blackguardx 18y ago
  Yeah, just buy some really old capacitors or transformers and drain that cancer-inducing goodness out.
- blahblahblah 18y ago
  That was the first thought that popped into my head upon reading the title. That's the problem with acronyms - namespace collisions occur far too frequently (and it's even worse in this case because both variants of PCB are used within the same technical domain). Fortunately, the authors at least bothered to define the term at the point when it is first used in the text (as is standard practice in science literature). There's nothing quite so annoying as encountering a blog full of alphabet soup that makes no attempt to define abbreviations properly.

mhb 18y ago

Save yourself a lot of time, trouble and dealing with nasty chemicals and take a look at http://www.apcircuits.com/ http://www.apcircuits.com/ or http://www.pcb-pool.com/ppuk/index.html http://www.pcb-pool.com/ppuk/index.html. I've used them both with excellent results. Other people have also been happy with http://www.expresspcb.com/ http://www.expresspcb.com/ which offers free layout software.

blackguardx 18y ago
mhb is right. This may look easy, but is actually a pain in the ass. It is fine for small circuits, like in the example. For big projects, drilling out all the vias or thru-holes is tedious. There are also registration issues and etch time issues. There is a reason why commercially made prototype circuit boards are so popular.
zaius 18y ago
Agreed. If you're doing one tiny board, save the effort and use veroboard. For anything above that, get it printed.

wyday 18y ago

What are the advantages of homemade PCB boards over wire-wrap? Is compactness the only advantage?

blackguardx 18y ago
Wire wrap creates a huge tangle of wires that is hard to debug. With careful PCB layout, you can create circuits that operate at microwave frequencies due to the lower parasitics. Wire wrap circuits can't operate at high frequencies. There is too much series inductance and cross-coupling. Also, chips are increasingly moving towards surface mount only packaging. By the way, where are you getting your wire wrap supplies? I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years.
- wyday 18y ago
  > I didn't know they still made wire wrap guns. I don't know anyone who has used one in the last 15 years. I just use a manual wire-wrap/stripping tool (from digikey.com). I'm a software guy who dabbles in hardware, hence the arcane technology.
  - blackguardx 18y ago
    They are pretty good for that. Honestly, if you didn't want to go through the trouble to get a PCB fabbed by a commercial PCB vendor, wire wrap is a pretty good choice for simple circuits. When I do that simple stuff like that, I use wires and solder instead of a wire wrap tool. Wire wrap might be a little faster. If you want to prototype high speed analog/RF circuits without PCBs, take a look at "dirty" or "dead-bug" construction. HAM guys love it for building radios. You assemble your circuit over a piece of bare copper-clad board and solder the pins either directly together or short pieces of wire. People do this with both SMT and thru-hole parts. Jim Williams has a great tutorial on this technique: http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C1154,C1009,C1028,P1219,D4138 http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C11...
- dfox 18y ago
  But designing microwave PCBs requires significant effort, interesting feature of wirewrap is that it tends to work without careful layout to suprisingly high frequencies (~10MHz) that would start to require careful design for PCBs. Getting wirewrap guns or wire probably isn't much of problem but what I cannot find for reasonable prices are wirewrap boards.

waratuman 18y ago

This is amazing, wish I would have know how to do this before I made my microcomputer board. I ordered mine from 4pcb.com, but making it yourself is pretty sweet. Whenever I do something myself, it adds a lot of extra meaning to what I did.

Steve0 18y ago

The premise was very cool, Mc Gyver style. But let's be honest, who has ferric chloride solution in their kitchen cabinet?

dfox 18y ago
I have :)

fsilva 18y ago

There is also lots of information in this page http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/index.html http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/i... about an alternative to ferric cloride, acid cupric cloride. It is easier to buy, since all you are doing is mixing 2 parts oxygenated water with 1 part muriatic acid/HCl (@33%), which can be obtained at any hardware store. It shares the same problem with Ferric Cloride: after etching, the resulting solution is hazardous and should be disposed accordingly (€€/$$). I've done this at home just like the original article but with this other solution and after 3-4 tries got pretty good results. Good enough for some basic SMD circuits.

sokoloff 18y ago
Can you actually get muriatic acid at "any hardware store" nowadays? I'm 0 for 4 on 3 Home Depots and 1 Lowes in eastern MA.
- fsilva 18y ago
  I'm in Portugal so I can't comment on your experience. In here one can get it at any 'mom&pop' hardware store, which are more common than 'Home Depot' style stores.

Alex3917 18y ago

Sounds like a good way to turn your house into a superfund site.

mucachino 18y ago

This might be interesting for the reprap project, or?

ph0rque 18y ago
Actually, RepRap is moving towards (literally) printing their circuit boards using both conductive and insulative materials.

apstuff 18y ago

Tom Gootee's article is worth reading. He did a lot of the heavy lifting summarized in this article. I've tried this and it works -- but... You must be very, very careful with the solution -- whether it's Ferric Chloride from Radio Shack or a muriatic/peroxide homebrew. Gootee's article and others show how to create safe 'bubblers' for this step. Look at these first. Please be careful. You are entering 'Breaking Bad' territory here.

asciilifeform 18y ago

Unless your ironing technique is exceedingly thorough and your boards perfectly smooth, you will get pitted/broken traces. I found that the more traditional photographic method is just as quick, and the supplies cost approximately the same.

diN0bot 18y ago

how important are thru-holes? my friends and i are making a cheap desktop circuitboard miller. it mills away the copper with a blade rather than etching. it can do both sides of the board in series, but no thru-holes. is this something anyone would be interested in?

proee 18y ago

True Story: My first experience in making PCB's didn't go so well. I was in junior high and just started getting into electronics because I was obsessed with the dream of creating my own car-audio amps (think Kicker, JBL, etc). Note I was way to young for even a driver's license but that didn't stop me from planning out for when I was old enough to roll (aka Weird Al - White & Nerdy) Anyway, I created my first PCB in autocad and took it out into the garage for etching... "Hmmm I needed something to pour the etching acid into... Something that I could throw away when I'm done... Ah! This pie tin will work out nicely!" So I took the pie tin and placed it on the surface of my Dad's table saw and then placed my unetched PCB in the tin. Then next step of course was to pour the acid in the tin...... $%^&!!!!! The acid reacted violently with the metal of the tin and within seconds the bottom of the tin was completed digested by the acid which then proceeded to flow out of the tin, onto the table saw, and then all over the garage floor. To this day, the table saw still has a rusty look to it and there is a nice brown stain in the concrete. My career as a "EE" was founded on pure genius!