Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Forum is on fire

[blinky465 17208xp 0]

I used my photon to create a pcb mask before etching in ferric chloride. It worked, but was quite fiddly. Double-sided tape to stick the copper board to the print plate, then obviously re-level with the added thickness. I usually have my first layer at 70 seconds and print three layers.

But turning a pcb layout into an svg, then extruding (in Blender) to create a 3d model to get an .stl, then slicing to create a bitmap to send to the photon, then aborting after a couple of layers (after all, once the first layer or two has stuck, your mask is done) – it’s a lot of messing about…. if there was any way of loading a bitmap as a “sliced layer” to avoid all those steps (there has to be, since the Photon file validator lets you edit bitmaps after slicing) it might be feasible.

I tried it. It worked. But 70 sec exposure meant a trace of less than 0.4mm was difficult to acheive. So I went back to my usual method of painting the copper clad board in black paint (to create a solid mask) then etching the pcb design off the paint using a laser cutter and could get traces down to 0.3mm again.

Cleaning the double-sided tape off my print plate afterwards wasn’t a fun job. And finding a perfectly flat board wasn’t easy either.