DIY PCB Station
Hardware- 1 Devlogs
- 2 Total hours
A DIY station for making PCBs with the dry film toner-transfer method. Consists of a UV exposure box and solution agitator for PCB etching and development.
Hi everyone! This is my first devlog.
My project is a DIY PCB Station that comes in two parts: a UV exposure box for exposing circuit patterns onto copper clad boards, and a solution agitator for PCB etching/development to make DIY PCBs! The station works with either pre-sensitized boards (boards that have a positive photoresist layer already applied), or dry-film negative photoresist that you laminate onto a copper clad board. You can read up on the chemical processes behind PCB making with this helpful article: https://www.protoexpress.com/kb/pcb-manufacturing-overview/
This is just a basic little project that I think would be cool to use to make PCBs for my future projects. The idea is that you turn a knob potentiometer to set the brightness and duration of the UV light exposure (displayed on a 16x2 LCD screen), and then let the thing run. The UV light is a 5V LED strip that I bought for $8 from Amazon, and the brightness will be controlled by PWM from an Arduino Nano pin, which will hook up to the gate pin of a MOSFET (the Arduino will definitely not be powering the LED strip directly).
I started this project a few weeks before I discovered Stardance, so much of my coding for the LCD is not logged. You can find my spaghetti code for it on my GitHub (whenever I decide to publish that). Otherwise, there is technically no need to involve code in this project; it’s just for the LCD.
This project is inspired by TechBuilder’s DIY PCB Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyBgbNPrWg8&
My current progress with the LCD screen can be seen in this demo video: