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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Hi all. Upon speaking to another guy over here who has made his own 3D printer that puts my feeble efforts to shame, I had a couple of ideas.
1) PCB making is always a pain due to the multiple steps needed for a successful board. One thing which I discovered is that sulphur containing powders stick quite effectively to bare copper, and if heated gently to over 59C the sulphur reacts with the copper. The resulting copper sulphide is both memristive when dry and fairly hard to remove, in fact it took a lot of scrubbing to completely remove it. If left for more than a day or so it does flake off, in thick sheets.
My idea is to laser "etch" the sulphur layer placed on the board in much the same way as an additive 3D printer, but upon removing the board place it in a weak etchant. An additional step here is to electroplate over the existing tracks then etch, as the copper is thicker the layers should hold together for long enough to expose the pristine copper under the sulphide.
This is a proof of concept for now, as I haven't heard of anything like this.
2) Recycling BA7642FS's
A lot of perfectly good microstepping drivers get trashed as WEEE every day in the form of dead optical drives. These often have nice lasers as well as high accuracy steppers, many folks have made laser etchers.
Upon dismantling certain brands of Philips DVD writers, it became obvious that the chips have "breakout points" showing all the useful signals. Each chip has one bipolar multistep driver, a 3 phase motor driver AND dual channel power amplifier with a convenient 5V/12V supply.
A breakout board with three of these would be very handy, and could be populated in half an hour with solder paste, a laser cut stencil, heat gun and some gentle SMD rework that should not harm the chip. If the chips are damaged it normally manifests as a short between Vcc and Gnd, which helps as the centre pad is normally tied to Vcc.
Registered Member #65
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155
The mechanical tolerances and material will limit your build quality. Although many kits “look†flimsy, they are usually laser cut on a precision machine or made from “faced†extrusions.
Note some rep-rap extruder kits are less than $500 these days.
Unfortunately, if there was an easier manufacturing method the thousands of clever people out there would have found it by now. You will likely end up wasting hundreds of hours on an unusable machine.
Registered Member #3324
Joined: Sun Oct 17 2010, 06:57PM
Location:
Posts: 1276
Carbon_Rod wrote ...
Unfortunately, if there was an easier manufacturing method the thousands of clever people out there would have found it by now. You will likely end up wasting hundreds of hours on an unusable machine.
One of those 'thousands of clever people out there' hasto find it, lets hope that hes onto somthing and his the the one! sounds somewhat feasable to me!
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Laser etching ideas
