Hand-Drawn and Inkjet Printed Circuits for the Masses (Video)

We started looking at ways to make instant hand-drawn or inkjet-printed circuit boards because Timothy met an engaging young man named Yuki Nishida at SXSW. Yuki is a co-founder of AgIC, a company that makes conductive ink pens and supplies special paper you can use to write or draw circuits or, if you have the right model of Brother printer, to print them with special inkjet inks. The AgIC people are aggressively putting the 'A' in STEAM by marketing their products to artists and craftspeople. Indeed the second line on their website's home page says, 'AgIC offers handy tools to light up your own art works.' This is an excellent niche, and now that AgIC has developed a circuit eraser (due to ship this April), it may lead to all kinds of creative designs. And as is typical with this kind of company these days, AgIC has been (at least partly) crowdfunded.

A little cursory Google searching will soon lead you to other companies selling into the home/prototype circuit board market, including Cartesian Co and their Argentum 3-D printer that does prototype and short-run PCBs and only costs $899 (on special at the time this was written) and Electroninks, which markets the Circuit Scribe pen and associated materials with an emphasis on education. There are others in this growing field, and a year from now there will probably be more of them, all working to replace the venerable breadboard the same way electronic calculators replaced slide rules.

Comments

The breadboard isn't going away anytime soon...

[mlts]

The nice thing about the breadboard is that you can work on one project, and either keep it, or yank the components off and put something different.

Even a short run device that allows one-off PCBs means that if stuff needs modified, the PCB needs to be tossed and a new one made.

I would give this device a place in the lab, but for the original product development, the breadboard will still be king. However, for testing an appliance, being able to one-off custom PCBs... especially multilayered ones... is quite useful.

Re:It's not a slow news day.

[ArcadeMan]

I'm waiting for the "Akira absorbs systemd" story.

Trace resistance

[thegarbz]

One of the biggest problems with these systems is the trace resistance. Silver ink has in every case so far been orders of magnitude higher in resistance than a small copper trace effectively making these systems useless for anything that carries power. I'm not talking about big power either, simply powering several micros, a few logic chips and a couple of relays on a circuit is enough to bring the current up that you can't just run everything in the same trace.

I predict lots of people will set fire to their projects.

We aready have this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called etching. You take a copper clad board, print the resist pattern onto it (usually by a photo resist process, but you can do it directly using a printer if you have one) then you etch off the exposed copper. Volia, you have a circuit card. Two layers are fairly easy, and if you need more than 2 layers (which is LIKELY for most digital boards of moderate complexity) you can send off the data to a board manufacturer and have your prototype board back in a few weeks, etched, layered, drilled, stuffed and soldered if you want.

Why do we need this? For the hobbyist? Nope. Who can afford a special printer for this? For the standard photo etching process your current printer will work great. For the quick turn prototypes in professional situations? Maybe, but I'm guessing sending it out and waiting will be more cost efficient in most cases unless you are limited to two layers in which case you can likely just hack it by cutting traces and adding wire to the prototype until you can get the new cards etched, drilled and stuffed from the vendor.

So, unless this is cheaper, faster or somehow better than the industry standard photo etching of copper clad boards for the companies that do prototype card production, nobody really needs this. Given today's bent towards surface mount, which comes with a whole new garage full of expensive equipment to really do the right way, it is just better to send your boards out to a third party to be etched, drilled, stuffed and soldered. Waste of time....

Re:We aready have this

[pz]

Given today's bent towards surface mount, which comes with a whole new garage full of expensive equipment to really do the right way, it is just better to send your boards out to a third party to be etched, drilled, stuffed and soldered.

We've been doing some prototyping in my lab. I've been trained on old-school point-to-point prototypes. They work very well, are usually pretty good models for actual performance, and when its all said and done, take just about as much time as anything else.

My employee, a younger fellow, built a prototype with a breadboard. Egad, I remember those from undergraduate years, and how much I hated them. I spent more time debugging that mess of wires than it would have taken to build it point-to-point from the start.

Except that now everything is surface mount. We were getting ready to buy a rework station. And build one of those hotplate / toaster oven processing things. Then, I found a couple of videos showing people soldering SMT devices with a hand-held iron just fine thankyouverymuch. And, you know, it works great. The key is a steady hand (which I have, even though my assistant does not) and -- critically -- a stereo microscope. Assembling boards can be done pretty fast. In ways, it's faster than through-hole, and heaps less frustrating 'cause you don't need to keep flipping the board back and forth all the time.

The best part is that it's become ridiculously inexpensive to get PCBs made of medium size, with free (as in beer), or nearly free, tools that are really pretty good (and I've used the $25K/seat stuff, too). I've got three full-custom PCBs in front of me that, other than the ECOs from being prototypes, are professional grade. While they weren't free, they were affordable, and much more so than, say, 10 years ago.

So who needs one of these print-you-own circuits? Not me. Or a setup to etch boards myself? No thank you, I'll stay clear of those chemicals. I'm much happier spending a little more to have my boards come back perfect, with real vias, and even four layers if I want! But a garage full of specialized equipment? Nope. Just the old bench, iron, solder, wick, flux, with the addition of a microscope.

Re:We aready have this

[sg_oneill]

Yep, I remember as a kid building a crystal radio with my dad, and he used a photo-resist etching solution to build the pcb. The end result was pretty damn pro. I still have that radio, 30 years later, and it works great.

Re:We aready have this

[JanneM]

I solder SMT components by hand as well. Don't even need a microscope; just head-mounted magnifier glasses is plenty. Make sure you have good light and plenty of flux and you're good to go.

But the problem is the board. Sure, if you have a finished design already, and you intend to actually use it in the future, then sending off for a finished PCB is good. But if it's just a hobby, and you're prototyping or just playing around to better understand a particular circuit, then spending a good chunk of money and weeks of time for a board is simply not feasible. You really want to set something up, try it, then tear it down and try the next idea.

With that said, I don't know that this is the answer either. Hand-drawn does not sound precise enough to handle SMT, and a whole separate device just making prototype boards sounds like too much money and space for a hobbyist. Perhaps the answer is desktop mills that become cheap and precise enough that you can use them to cut out boards from copper blanks along with other building tasks. At least that would not be a single-purpose gadget.

Re:We aready have this

[PurpleAlien]

Over here in Europe we have http://www.eurocircuits.com/ You can get prototypes of your board in single digit quantity for very little money ( 100Euro easily). Seven days later, you have your boards in the mail. No issues with double sided boards, or even multilayer. They also take Eagle files directly, so no need to generate Gerber files etc. In addition, their web interface allows you to visually inspect your boards to make sure all the design rules are correct, and this also helps getting to a lower class of complexity of the PCB and lower your cost even further.

Re:We aready have this

[langelgjm]

Yeah, soldering SMT is not that hard, at least for the larger packages and pitches. The no-lead stuff is hard without specialized tools, but with a decent iron, flux, good light, and a loupe you can accomplish a lot.

My strategy is to prototype on a breadboard, and use breakout boards for the SMT components. Then when the design has been thoroughly tested, design a PCB that either accepts the larger SMT stuff directly, or accepts the breakout boards. Requires lots of care in design, and all my projects have been relatively simple, but if you're patient, the result is good and not very expensive.

I've tried the print and etch process, but the pitches you can achieve are not small enough to make it worthwhile for me. The whole point of getting away from perfboard was to use SMT, and in my experience it's too easy to mess up small traces when etching at home.

Re:We aready have this

[pz]

Lots of flux is important. We found that using just gobs and gobs of it, made for really pretty easy soldering that avoided solder bridges and reliably gave us beautiful connections. And by gobs and gobs, I mean enough that the leads are submersed. Naturally, that much of it needs to be cleaned up afterwards, but some alcohol and a toothbrush works well. I worry a little about the flux that gets trapped under each IC, though.

However, when we, on occasion, needed to remove some components, especially ICs, we discovered that there was absolutely no molten solder incursion under the leads. We're using gold-plated boards from OSH Park, so it's easy to see where the solder has flowed and where it hasn't. I suppose if we were even more serious about prototype manufacturing, we'd get some solder paste to lay down first, but we haven't made it to that level of sophistication, yet.

Old news

[elgatozorbas]

Hate to rain on this guy's parade, but conductive ink pens have already been for sale for quite some time. If he wants to reinvent the wheel, enjoy. Quite honestly, this looks amateuristic, so gefundenes Fressen for artists and "installations", I guess. Sorry for being so negative, it just feels unfair sometimes that hardware designers working their ass of to get you all these nice fancy iGadgets are rarely held in high esteem, while "artists" can "invent" something old, build something trivial (20 lights in parallel!) and makea big deal out of it.

The conductive ink plotter which was featured here some time ago is something completely different, of course.

Trace reactance, too.

[Stormbringer]

Just because the R in RC is distributed like this doesn't mean it's not real. All of the usual board-level capacitances are real, too, so long traces simply won't carry fast clocked signals cleanly.