I love seeing DIY PCB manufacturing projects like this. Using the 3D printer as a plotter is a creative take on the traditional DIY process.
For any aspiring EE hobbyists: Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort. You'll spend days or weeks getting the process and tooling right, and you still have to manually wire any vias that connect the front and back sides of the PCB. These DIY PCB manufacturing projects are fun if you're in it for the experience, but very impractical for getting work done. It's quick and easy to order small quantity PCBs online.
OSH Park is a popular option: https://oshpark.com/#services You can get 3 boards in 9-12 days for $5/square inch. If you need the boards sooner, $10/square inch will get you a 4-5 day turnaround time. You won't save any money by buying all of the gear to DIY etch your boards, and you certainly won't save any time.
> Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort
I don't know, for me, since I already had an entry-level 3D printer and Dremel, I was able to mod it to engrave the negative of a PCB onto these copper plates in a few days. Now I can get from design to finished PCB in an hour.
I suspect many people getting into EE might have some of these tools already, and being able to iterate quickly with locally-available supplies is a huge advantage, especially for people new to PCB design.
Edit: I would like to add that my method was rather poorly though out and the method in article is much better. Putting a Dremel on a 3D printer is not a good idea, it was just the first thing I came up with and it happened to work ok-ish for my very basic needs.
Actually, PCB milling[1] is a thing. I suppose a MPCNC can be used for that. But it still has the huge drawback that you're limited to one layer if you're lazy (like me) or two if you fell like spending the time to add manual vias - though I was told there are tools for that, which work essentially like... Err... riveting pliers? (sorry, non native speaker)
Given that multi-layer PCBs are effectively laminations of individual boards, hobbyists have already made their own multilayer boards [1]. I don't see anything particular about milling as a means of copper removal that would stop you layering up boards?
Thanks for the link, nice to know it can be done at the hobyyist-level. But it's still a lot of work I (personally) do not enjoy spending time with. If I had the space I'd probably setup my (hypothetical) MPCNC for milling PCBs, so I can do quick single layer prototypes (maybe some simple stacking using header rows), but anything more complex would still go to a fab.
It's not a terrible idea, and I've wanted to play around with the concept myself, but I've never really had time or an acute need.
The Snapmaker (1) is a 3d printer with changeable heads. For mine I mostly use the 3d printing head or the low-power laser engraving head, but it also came with a milling head and they sell a higher-power laser head that can cut some materials.
I looked around and people have had trouble trying this with the milling head. The bit usually breaks and the X axis isn't stable enough. Maybe v2.0 will be more sable since it has a second Z axis mount.
That being said, their mounting platform is modular. There's nothing to stop you from fabricating a dremel mount and ripping apart an existing milling head to interface it with the dremel.
Those prices and lead times don't seem very competitive. At Sunstone I pay $5/sq in for 1-day service on a 2-layer board. If I was willing to wait a week it's $1/sq in.
I think people who are impressed by 3d printers often aren't very experienced with how easy it is to make or get made the things they are printing. I can draw a board in my EDA program, hit a button at 6pm and come back to work with the boards on my desk at 8am the next morning, if I want to pay for that. Same deal for parts: I can order a box full of crap from Digi-Key at 10pm Pacific Time and the Fedex guy will drop it on my desk 10 hours later. Electronics prototyping is extremely well developed, fast, and dirt cheap.
Do you have some sort of special deal on pricing? What sort of quantities are you ordering? For oshpark, it's $5/sq in for a batch of 3 boards. I just checked the prices at sunstone and they quoted ~$35 per board for a 1 square inch 2-layer board for 1-day service or $14 per board for 1-week.
You are right, we live in the golden age of electronics prototyping. I'll throw in plugs for the Octopart search engine for finding parts, and PCBEX for inexpensive prototype boards up to ten layers.
Yeah I had kind of a weird reaction to his comment.
I was inspired by Ben Eater's YouTube series about making a breadboard computer. Rather than copying his schematics, I designed my own. Took a very long time. Went on digikey and Amazon and dropped probably around $1k in parts and tools. Now I'm building the damn thing and it's very time consuming.
I also recently bought a new laptop for $200 which is many orders of magnitude more capable than my breadboard computer eventually will be. Does that fact mean my time, effort, and money spent on the breadboard computer is a waste? Hell no.
I think that just proves his point. You're spending time doing the parts of the project that interests you.
Manufacturing PCBs isn't electrical engineering, it's process engineering. I'm sure there are some process-engineering hobbyists, so if people want to spend their time doing that, then cool. But his point is that if it's the electronic engineering part you're interested in, spending a lot of time tweaking and improving your DIY PCB manufacturing when you can order dirt cheap boards from China that arrive in less than two weeks, that are far and away better than what you could do at home, that generally isn't worth it.
> Does that fact mean my time, effort, and money spent on the breadboard computer is a waste? Hell no.
Well you did spent $1k in parts and tools instead of building theses parts and tools yourself, didn't you? His argument wasn't that it's not worth the experience, in fact he even mention how the experience can be worth it if that's what you want to experience. If your goal is just to get a PCB, then paying for a professionally made PCB will worth it (just like in your case spending $1k in parts and tools will worth it).
I disagree that it won't save time, if just for the fact that 30 minutes is less than 9-12 days. I usually need neither the quality nor the quantity that these fabs will give me, so being able to quickly make a PCB is definitely worth it for me.
That makes a lot of sense to me. One of the reasons I stick mostly with software is that it allows for much quicker iteration. That increases both my ability to explore a space (when working divergently) and polish a product (when I'm in convergence mode). Hardware is, well, hard.
Iteration speed can make a huge difference in outcome. I read that the average consumer electronics company goes through 3-7 physical product iterations. Apple, on the other hand, went through more than 100 generations of prototype for the first iPod.
Obviously what you've done here is just getting started, but it points in a really interesting direction. A 3D printer with swappable heads for plotting and an add-on PCB etching kit should definitely have a market. That would mean recurring revenue for PCB supplies at a good margin, too.
> That makes a lot of sense to me. One of the reasons I stick mostly with software is that it allows for much quicker iteration.
4-5 day turnaround from OSH park is quite fast. Keep in mind that you usually need to order parts from Digi-Key or another supplier when you finish the design anyway. If you have a mistake on a PCB, it's faster to use a tiny stitch wire than to make a whole new PCB.
On a professional level: You can always buy fast turn PCBs if you need them ASAP, but you'll pay for it. Usually cheaper than paying engineers to fiddle with finicky PCB milling or etching machines, though.
> Obviously what you've done here is just getting started, but it points in a really interesting direction. A 3D printer with swappable heads for plotting and an add-on PCB etching kit should definitely have a market.
On the professional level, several manufacturers make dedicated PCB mills: https://www.lpkfusa.com/products/pcb_prototyping/machines/ These machines have helpful features to index tools to the surface and align the panels as you flip them over for two-layer designs.
I have extra parts at home, exactly because of this. But I can not order extra PCBs with my future mistakes corrected. So it's either make them myself or try a single design, spot my failure, correct, order a new one, wait a week or two until I have some more free time to mess with it.
Or avoid PCBs completely, what is clearly the best option whenever possible (what is becoming less and less common).
To be fair, modern EDA software helps a lot with not making mistakes. If your schematic diagram and tolerance settings are correct, it is pretty hard to get the PCB wrong. Every time I had a problem with one, I had made a mistake in the schematic (and once the fab house mistakenly bridged pads because my tolerances were too tight).
I wholeheartedly recommend KiCAD if you aren't already using it.
Seconding KiCAD. Their software is fairly intuitive- especially if you're used to Linux- and it's super helpful for making sure that your designs are logical and stuff, and you can also use it to figure out how to best breadboard your designs as well.
I disagree and think saying it's intuitive is doing people a disservice. It's not intuitive at all, but it's more intuitive than the alternatives and it won't take you very long to learn how to use it.
If you don't get it immediately, don't worry, that's normal. Just watch some tutorials and you'll be good to go in a few hours.
Okay, you're right. I'd forgotten that I'd A) had a failed start with it and B) only gotten past that once I had to use it for a school project. That being said, once you figure it out, it's really powerful. It just takes a bit to get there, and I'd forgotten the beginning of my learning curve.
Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for reminding me of how hard it was for me personally to start.
No problem, and I agree, it's very powerful and it's fun to use. It doesn't take very long to get a feel for what's going on, and it's very rewarding afterwards, as you know.
Digikey, Mouser, and Arrow, for the most part, give me next business day delivery for cheap (often free). From Arrow, I think the minimum is only $50 for "free" overnight shipping.
"Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort."
It depends on the target device. For analog or simpler digital circuits prototypes where single side boards can be used it's still very convenient, with the only annoyance being the etchant treatment and disposal. In the old days I made things easier by adding one intermediate step in which I redrew the schematic as the ICs and keyed parts were seen bottom up, that is, ICs had the 1 pin up right, etc. Also the schematic wasn't arranged functionally, like an opamp drawing for example, but it rather showed how the pcb was going to look from solder side. From then on, copying it on the actual pcb became a breeze. As for drawing on the pcb, I did all by hand, using both transfer sheets with pads where necessary and thin (1mm or less) normal water resistant markers for connections, buses etc. Faber Castell and Staedtler were my favorites, as I found those specific for pcb drawing were a lot worse quality wise, not to mention like 4x more expensive.
This method would of course not scale with circuits complexity, more than one layer and or series production, still I enjoyed a lot being able to design, etch and solder even moderately complex circuits in one evening or a week end in "mom's basement" (actually dad's attic...:). With time I also trained myself to draw my schematics directly that way, so I could get rid of one step between drawing on paper and the final drawing on the pcb. I miss those days...
> You'll spend days or weeks getting the process and tooling right, and you still have to manually wire any vias that connect the front and back sides of the PCB.
Fancy! At school we had a UV box & bath, and made single-sided PCBs. I assume you can use the same process just with boards that have copper both sides. It was great for demystifying the process, and I suspect economical in a school setting.
(Aside: I then studied EE (+CS mix) at university, and there was none if that. Many of my peers without the opportunity to take Electronics at GCSE & A Level would be nonethewiser. Maybe that's fine, lines have to be drawn, but seems to me like an easy extension of existing lab assignments.)
As a hobbyist, if I had the room I'd certainly want the kit. Nothing beats the immediacy for prototyping , or turning around fixes/modifications. The basic stuff isn't prohibitively expensive, we're not talking even hundreds of units before break-even.
I do it at home (PCB mill) for RF circuits on Rogers 5880 and similar materials. At work though (more RF), I just order it.
Seems to always be $3k-$5k per run no matter how many boards and what material. You are buying the PCB lines time yourself rather than sharing the cost.
I had twelve boards recently from OSH Park for a whopping $3.37 total, which includes shipping. They were small boards.
My mill has the cutter fully surrounded by a vacuum manifold, and the vacuum itself is bag and HEPA filtered.
The compressed paper PCBs have horrible properties. The RF laminated all have specific properties for electrical performance; dielectric constant, low loss tangent, low surface roughness, homogeneity, controller thermal expansion, thermal conductivity.
Professionally- agreed.
However I look at it as a learning exercise, which is a wonderful way of calibrating one's sense of time/money quadrants.
If you don't have time, but have money- send it to overnight PCB service.
If you have time, don't have money- do it yourself.
If you have both- send it to regular PCB service.
Now the last one is the least desirable quadrant to be in- if you don't have neither time nor money and this is the first time you're doing this- expect to find either (or even both) of those, at least until you have gotten the equipment and gone through the process a couple of times.
I've seen hobbyists use JLC PCB in the past for low quantity runs and the quality always seems astounding with relatively quick turnaround times (several days). https://jlcpcb.com/
Looks like they do SMT mount now too which wasn't the case last time I looked at their offering.
FWIW PCBWay generally gets my weekend orders to me within the week, and costs about the same as JLC ($5 for 5 boards plus $15 shipping). In some cases I've put an order in on Friday night and gotten them on Tuesday.
Yeah, shipping in the US is much faster. Here in Greece you have to pay 3 euros minimum on shipping charges and shipping from anywhere in the EU will take at least a week.
I have used markers for touching up toner-transfer boards (not that one). I found that markers do not resist the etching solution as well as toner. Toner provides a higher build of plastic resin material on the surface than the trail left by a marker. (Perhaps doing multiple coats with the marker could build it up.)
I would also highly recommend doing "copper pours" as I did with the above board. Etch away as little copper as possible. The etch will be efficient and fast.
The circuit board in my above images was etched inside a tiny container, in minutes! In fact, the "etching tank" I used was a plastic bottle cap from a 1.9 liter V-8 juice.
If you etch away most of the copper and insist on getting those large, etched areas very clean, that may take so much etching that it will eat into the traces that you want to keep, leaving them in rough shape, and maybe even nonworking.
The resist only protects the copper from the top. The sides of every trace are exposed. Leave it in the solution long enough and the etchant will work its way under the resist and etch them away.
Of course, copper pours require large black areas, which probably doesn't translate to good economics if you're using markers. A mixed approach might be possible: do smaller copper pours in the the nooks and corners around the traces and pads, and cover large areas with rectangular pieces of electrical tape.
You're basically spot on, I had all these problems that you mention. I didn't think of adding planes (I actually had them but removed them) because I didn't want the printer to spend an eternity drawing, but after you mentioned it, it makes sense that it's definitely worth it.
My father (and my self did a few) made a lot of prototype PCB with the toner technique. A trick that I learned from him, was giving a coat of tin alloy to fix any micro cut made by defects on the copper or the toner transfer.
You asked about safety. Sodium persulfate isn't that risky [1]; your main concern is respiratory, so keeping the temperature low is a good intuition. If you decide to work with higher heat to accelerate the etch, wear breathing protection.
Sodium persulfate is a strong oxidizer, which is what makes it an effective etchant, but that also makes it a fire risk. In storage, keep it cool and dry; silica gel moisture scavenger packets probably aren't a bad idea. And, of course, keep it away from anything flammable.
Finally, it's a good idea not to dispose of the used etchant solution down a drain. Check with your municipality to find a safe disposal method, rather than add it to the ecosystem where it will poison wildlife.
Thanks for this! Would it be okay to etch with the container lid on? That would take care of fumes even at slightly higher temperatures, but I don't know whether it'll cause some other problem.
I'd hesitate to try that. You'd be making a pressure vessel, and while this doesn't seem a tremendously energetic process, it will become more so with increased temperature. Having a small explosion in your flat probably isn't a good time, either!
If it were me, instead of a sealed container I'd just run the process under an open window with a fan propped in it to exhaust whatever fumes develop, and maybe under an improvised fume hood made of a cut-open garbage bag and masking tape. (If you do that, make sure to leave space at the bottom for intake air. The idea is to make a funnel that will pull room air in, mix it with process gas, and exhaust the lot outside instead of into your living space.)
The window-and-fan method worked well when using vinegar-based iron acetate stain, and later polyurethane sealant, on a quite large table I made back when I lived in a tiny apartment; for a low-volume process like this, it'll probably do just fine, I'd think.
Don't use a marker. I use 2-3 layers of TPU filament or Ninjaflex over copper treated with washable adhesive. Works wonderfully. As always, clean the copper very well with isopropyl before anything. You can also do flex PCBs this way:
Adherence. Normal PLA/ABS or other plastic filaments will shrink when they cool down, and cause the thin layer of material to pull and separate from the copper. TPU is rubber-like and will have less inner stress to pull the material off. Also PLA absorbs humidity and will tend to change volume in a solution, with the same propensity to separate from the copper during the etching. TPU has more impermeability.
I have also tried using adhesion glues and hair sprays. Sometimes a thin application of hair spray (removed with a quick spray of isopropyl before the etching) helps a bit to define the edge traces. However I found that cleaning the copper very well, having a clean chamber in the printer and controlling well the etching temperature to reduce the etching time has the same effect and is less burdensome.
Good question. Not yet. When I carried out the tests (3+ years ago) I didn't have PETG filament around. Then TPU worked well for me and I have been sticking with it. I have a couple of PETG spools now so I will certainly try it next time!
OK, I am puzzled: 2D printing is a dark art, but 3D printing is not?
And comparing this to Chinese PCB manufacturing services is weird, too. If you want double sided, with vias, down to tiny traces, with plating and solder-stop and text, then you may be willing to pay the shipment and wait a few days.
Yes, I admit that this is a fun method. But what is the advantage over laser printing and then, say, using UV light to transfer to a photo PCB?
Honestly, I do not get why laser printers are a dark art, please explain!
I came here with the same question. I can see how the laser printer approach might have its own difficulties, but from a layman's perspective this seems like the most accessible & reproducible path.
It's very much an art. Gotta have the right paper, printer, and temperature application, and there's no good way to know until you have a feel for it. Plus finding a laser printer is a hassle now.
I don't know about everyone else, because what you're saying seems to be a common sentiment and multiple people here mention "just" getting a $200+ piece of equipment, but neither the $200 nor finding the space to put the printer on is worth it to me for the ~1 PCB per year I want to make (and ~0 pages I want to print).
At most, I might go to a printing place and ask them to print a page, but my 3D printer is right there and this saves me a trip.
I think it was actually right around $200, but I'm not saying people should get a 3D printer instead of a 2D printer, I'm saying that making PCBs with what you have is better than making them with something you have to buy. If you already have a laser printer, that will probably be much better for you (unless you have a 3D printer too :p).
This post is basically saying "if you don't have a laser printer but have a 3D one, you can still make PCBs!" :)
It's fun to turn a 3d-printer into a plotter,
but alas only for simple stuff.
A given-away laser printer (that is, $0) and $25 laminator deliver 15 mil / 0.4 mm traces easily and consistently.
I very much doubt any pen can do that, even with proper mount - the rubber band will just ruin any accuracy and consistency, and even if the pen is hard fixed, the tip will still wobble, plus always imperfect levelling will mess with the track width.
This is true, that's why v2 of my mount uses a zip tie! That one works much better, and I don't really need 0.4mm traces for the quick PCBs I need. If I need tighter tolerances, I can make the PCB this way, see that it works, change the tolerance and send it to a fab.
Yeah, I'd be really interested in hearing how well those conductive inks work when used for a complete project.
Based on what Circuitscribe's website says, their ink has about 100x the resistance of a standard 1oz copper PCB (for the same length and width), so I can imagine that you would have to be extra careful about how you route your power traces and position your decoupling capacitors.
I have used Circuit Writer and Caikote for fixing lifted traces and remotes etc. I don't know if it will be either feasible or cost-effective, for small to medium projects. Good writeup, by the way!
It's not unknown for people to hand-draw PCBs with permanent markers in much the way you describe. It's not a new idea, but with 3D printers being common these days, it's nice to remind people of this approach to PCB manufacture.
Having made a few PCBs at home, my experience is the etching if the weak link. It's hard to get consistent, high quality traces - particularly if there is any kind of high density layout.
With some effort you can to double sided PCBs using this kind of technique, but any kind of through-plating has to be done manually.
A while back there was a discussion here about how crosstalk in rectilinear traces (I think there’s a term for this but this is how I think of them) are becoming a bit of a problem and that more organic looking lines (not unlike these) can help.
Audio people are notorious for detecting noise. That hand drawn circuit might be less artistic and more practical than you’d expect.
I designed a couple of small PCBs using crepe tape and etch-resist transfers. Sometimes this was directly onto the copper, but usually it was onto acetate to be used with UV sensitive etch-resist.
> It's not a new idea, but with 3D printers being common these days, it's nice to remind people of this approach to PCB manufacture.
Sure, but I had neither a 3D printer nor magazines nor an iron, and I didn't really want to get into that whole process, as it sounded like a hassle. Exporting gerbers directly to my 3D printer is trivial enough that I can do it in one minute.
> It's hard to get consistent, high quality traces - particularly if there is any kind of high density layout.
That is very possible, I still need to refine my etching technique. It's certainly been the hardest part in the ones I made, but that doesn't say much because the rest of the process was trivial.
> With some effort you can to double sided PCBs using this kind of technique, but any kind of through-plating has to be done manually.
I really want to experiment with that as well, but drilling will be harder. I wonder if it would just be easier to route some traces to the edge and solder them there instead of drilling a via.
Note to chemists: PCB is a printed circuit board not a polychlorinated biphenyl. i know i came for the wonder of atomic scale printers but still, printing circuits is cool too.
Another way to step up the resolution a notch is using photoresist coated PCB and a small UV laser. It is typically a negative process (exposed photoresist dissolves in developer solution), so you'd have to invert your plot/gcode, there are two extra steps (developing the exposed photoresist so it dissolves and dissolving the remaining photoresist after etching in acetone bath).
However, that brings you closer to being able to prototype a PCB for something with 0.5mm pitch.
Two problems. First, it's going to be hard to get any kind of rigidity without heavy clamping that may damage the printer head. Second, the mechanism isn't designed to drive that kind of load. So you're unlikely to get usable results, and you are likely to destroy the 3D printer while you're trying.
If you really want to do that kind of work, you'd be better off with something like a CNC-equipped Proxxon micromill. But that's several thousand dollars' worth of investment for a tool that's honestly not good for much beyond what you're already doing with it - those things are tiny, so unless you're making intricate model parts or something like that, you're going to have a hard time finding uses for it that don't run up against the physical limits of what it can handle.
And, after all, we're only talking here about removing a thou or two of material that can be oxidized away just fine. Not that machining isn't an absolute joy, but a chemical process makes a lot more sense here.
I use a lulzbot Taz and the toolheads are easy to swap out. I've seen a dremel tool holder for it on thingaverse, so that would take care of the weight and rigidity since it would be on its own mount instead of mounted to the actual extruder.
What do you mean by "drive that kind of load"? Are you talking about the weight, or pulling the dremel through the material to cut it (resistance)? If the latter, it seems that just going slow with the steppers and a high speed on the dremel would eliminate that?
Other people have converted their 3d printers to CNC machines. I'm not sure why this wouldn't be possible with a little effort. It seems cleaner/safer than dealing with chemicals?
That may be true, but 3d printer gantries are not built for the stresses of a dremel or cutting tool.
First, you'll get loads of wobble. Normally cnc machines use a 2 smoothrod with a leadscrew in the center for strong stability and smooth motion. Once you turn on a source that spins in X000 rpm, it will send motion through the whole system.
Secondly, once you start cutting anything stronger than foam, cutting will introduce shear forces on the gantry head itself. All 3d printers don't need to worry about XY rotational motion. That's usually a non-constrained degree of freedom.
Third, you need to mount the piece you're cutting or it'll move (duh!). But tabletop vises are HEAVY. Your bed probably can't support it. The only bed I know that could would be a 3 point Z leveling bed. Those're rare.
Feel free to try, and not take my word for it. But this has been attempted, and failed on many accounts.
If you're patient you can use vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and salt. You still create a copper salt that you need to dispose of properly. http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=835
Etching the small PCBs I created took a minimal amount of chemicals in the cut bottom of a water bottle. It's not nothing, but it wasn't a big problem.
I've had some success converting an old printer to do pen plotting, but I haven't tried PCB manufacture yet because Sharpie marker does not do a sufficient, reliable job at working as a mask. I haven't been able to even use it to touch up my own projects!
My experience is mostly with warmed Ferric Chloride as the etchant, so perhaps ymmv with other etchants. However, in my case, glossy photo paper + laserjet transferred with clothes or hair iron (a tedious and awful process) works well, but Sharpie has not been able to help me touching up any areas damaged by the transfer.
If anyone else has a better mask suggestion than Sharpie, I could try out that sort of thing instead.
Rather than using an etching solution, could you just use a Dremel style attachment to shave off the copper from the board to "reveal" your PCB design?
Nice! I tried doing this a few years ago with a RepRap build. It didn't go well! Bad marker, pigment that dissolved, not enough ink layers, but the most interesting one was with Staedtler markers which sorta dissolve previously laid down ink when I made multiple passes. Ended up doing toner transfer after giving up.
I wonder how would a thin plastic film cut with one of those vinyl sticker cutters would fare for masking.
Oh huh, I'm using an Edding 140S, in case it matters. It was what they gave me when I asked for a permanent marker, and it worked beautifully. Didn't dissolve at all in the etchant, yet wipes right off with some alcohol.
As long as it works or can be fixed with some bodge, I'm okay with that for prototypes. I do tend to tin the traces wherever they seem 'porous'. For broken traces, I use wrapping wire core soldered on tracks.
I couldn't tell from their website: can you solder to this stuff? If so, it sounds incredibly promising, but if not, then I'm struggling to see how you use this to connect standard components together.
Good point, the 'ink' is silver but there is no mention of whether it can be successfully soldered. I wonder if the ink lines can at least aid the flow of solder.
Given that there are wood and metal filaments, it may be possible (the flip side being the filaments are still only around 70% wood/metal, and are hard on extruders).
It will prevent the plastic layers from detaching too easily. Specially if you do the etching in a warm bath. If you do it right, the finish is far superior than using a marker, in particular edge traces that turn out very well defined. That means it's easier to do fine pitch SMD pads, for example.
Through the years I have done many PCBs using different methods: Sharpie markers, Posca pens, inkjet and laser printing, transfers of different materials, etc. Except perhaps for pro laser etching or routing, nothing beats photomasks. In my experience the quality I get with 3D filament compares to a DIY routing table, so if you have a 3D printer and don't mind chemical etching, you don't need one.
another idea that's on my list...apply a ground (as in classic copper plate etching). use a scribe to remove the negative and etch. my hope is that it will produce higher precision than a felt-tip for small pitch components
but I still haven't gotten over the activation energy of getting kicad output into gcode for the dirt cheap grbl machine I got
It is glued down. The fiberglass (FR4) is filled with glue, the back of copper foil is lightly roughed up with an oxidizer and then the materials are laminated together.
There are other ways to make PCBs with a 3D printer:
Instead of etching copper, some people directly print the circuitry with a solder extruder [1]. The idea's been around for a while [2] but circuit complexity is usually very limited. Here's a guide [3] (to a similar method) that uses a hobbyist 3D printer.
To improve on the article's pen-masking method, you can mount a laser instead of a pen to the 3D printer and expose a specially coated PCB [4]. Or expose UV light through an LCD [5].
One can also just mount a milling tool to the printer and cut away the copper directly [6]. A 3D printer's not designed to take the forces from milling well, so similar but specially designed machines are made [7].
The most impressive methods are geared toward industry:
A cutting-edge industry-grade electronics 3D printer looks like [8]: an inkjet-style printer with conductive and insulating (dielectric) inks.
Somewhat related, you can use a laser etching and electroplating process ("3D Moulded Interconnect Devices" "3D MID") to make PCBs on 3D printed weirdly shaped (i.e., definitely not flat) surfaces. [9] is an impressive example, and definitely check out a search engine's image results [10].
Is there any real value in PCBs like these these days? 2 layers from China can be fast and is very cheap. You can’t do anything complicated on these single layer DIY boards, they also carry the risk of defects potentially causing a lot of frustration.
There is mild value to photo-resist processing DIY, 2-sided is easy and it's a lot quicker than waiting for a shipment from china.
But 3d printing, CNC routing, all those methods are an order of magnitude coarser production and not suitable for anything except very simple projects, and veroboard/stripboard is about on-par signal integrity wise.
one niche where i'd argue it's not only valuable but also period correct is restoring and modifying vintage electronics. Frequently they are single sided through hole boards that were not born from a CAD program, and are not available for purchase. You can certainly make the new board with CAD and a fab house, but for things like vintage synthesizers a hand etched board may actually be more appropriate and original.
Also the importance of latency in some cases is significant. When the goal is to iterate a board quickly several times and a diy board is good enough, being able to have a board in an hour or less could mean multiple board iterations in one day where sending out to fab might draw out each board iteration to a week long wait.
Back in the 20th century, we did this with flat-bed pen plotters. Ink makes lousy resist anyway. Much better results using old fashioned transparency and photo resist.
It wasn't too bad, as you can see from the photos. I think the problem was that I left it way too long in the etchant because I didn't have a copper plane, but I will try with one next time.
For any aspiring EE hobbyists: Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort. You'll spend days or weeks getting the process and tooling right, and you still have to manually wire any vias that connect the front and back sides of the PCB. These DIY PCB manufacturing projects are fun if you're in it for the experience, but very impractical for getting work done. It's quick and easy to order small quantity PCBs online.
OSH Park is a popular option: https://oshpark.com/#services You can get 3 boards in 9-12 days for $5/square inch. If you need the boards sooner, $10/square inch will get you a 4-5 day turnaround time. You won't save any money by buying all of the gear to DIY etch your boards, and you certainly won't save any time.