

How to make PCBs at home in 1 hour without special materials  - ph0rque
http://www.riccibitti.com/pcb/pcb.htm

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ejs
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/>) 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.

~~~
ph0rque
Supposedly, you can substitute ferric chloride with hydrogen peroxide and
muriatic acid: [http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-
Chloride-e...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-
etchant!--A-better-etc/)

~~~
kragen
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.

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mhb
Save yourself a lot of time, trouble and dealing with nasty chemicals and take
a look at <http://www.apcircuits.com/> or <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/> which
offers free layout software.

~~~
blackguardx
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.

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fsilva
There is also lots of information in this page
[http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/i...](http://members.optusnet.com.au/~eseychell/PCB/etching_CuCl/index.html)

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
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
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.

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waratuman
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.

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

~~~
blackguardx
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
> 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
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,C11...](http://www.linear.com/pc/downloadDocument.do?navId=H0,C1,C1154,C1009,C1028,P1219,D4138)

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proee
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!

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apstuff
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.

------
mucachino
This might be interesting for the reprap project, or?

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

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ComputerGuru
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.

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asciilifeform
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.

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Steve0
The premise was very cool, Mc Gyver style. But let's be honest, who has ferric
chloride solution in their kitchen cabinet?

~~~
dfox
I have :)

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diN0bot
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?

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Alex3917
Sounds like a good way to turn your house into a superfund site.

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

~~~
mattchew
I was wondering why anyone would _want_ to make polychlorinated biphenyls at
home.

~~~
blahblahblah
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.

