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How to Make PCBs

How to make PCBs home

in 1 hour & W I T H O U T special materials

If you take your electronics hobby seriously, I guess you already feel the need for a simple and fast technique for making your own printed-circuit boards (PCB). Here I’m going to show how to make simple single-sided PCBs in a snap, using widely available materials. This technique works reliably for thin tracks down to 10 mils, and is suitable for most surface-mount parts.

What you need

 

Required materials		I used…	Where to find
	Magazines or advertising brochures (More on this later).	IEN magazine / TV programme magazine Mail-order catalogue Travel agent's brochures	Free in your mailbox
	Laser printer Alternately, a photocopier should work	Samsung  ML1710 with original toner cartridge. Inkjet printers/copiers don't work.	Attached to your PC
	Household clothes iron	Tefal Acquagliss 70s (dismissed unit, vapour was broken)	Ask mummy
	Copper clad laminate	FR4 laminate 1.6 mm thick (35um copper)	Radio Shack
	Etching solution	Ferric chloride solution, about 1 liter/ 0,26 gallons	Radio Shack
	Kitchen scrubs	Spontex “Azione Verde”	Grocery store
	Thinner (e.g. acetone)	Nail polish remover. Most solvents used in painting will do.	Grocery store
	Plastic coated wire	Plastic insulated copper wire, 1 mm diameter solid core (about 1 meter/3feet)	Electrical store

You need also: a blade cutter, scotch tape, sandpaper, kitchen paper, cotton wool, vice, hacksaw.

How it works

Laser printers and photocopiers use plastic toner, not ink, to draw images. Toner is the black powder that ends up on your clothes and desk when replacing the printer cartridge. Being plastics, toner is resistant to etching solutions used for making PCBs - if only you could get it on copper!
Modifying a printer for working with copper is out of question, but you can work around it with the toner-transfer principle. Like most plastics, toner melts with heat, turning in a sticky, glue-like paste. So why not print on paper as usual, place the sheet face-down on PCB copper, and melt toner on copper applying heat and pressure?
Almost right. Right now you got paper toner-glued to PCB copper. Last step is to find a way to remove paper leaving toner on the copper, and you’re done.
I must credit Thomas Gootee for finding a solution putting glossy, inkjet photo paper in his laser printer. He found that the glossy coating dissolves in water. As most of the toner does not penetrate the glossy surface, you can easily remove the paper support with water: the gloss dissolves and you can remove paper.
Clever, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, the kind of paper used by Thomas is being replaced by new, improved, WATERPROOF (!) photo paper. This is good for your photo prints, but doesn't work anymore for PCBs.

While searching for more information on the subject, I found a newsgroup thread that suggested replacing expensive inkjet photo paper with glossy paper recycled from magazines. Magazines use ink, not toner, for printing, so previous printing shouldn’t affect the process. Another great idea! I tried it and worked so well that I decided to spread the word. Read on for a complete tutorial and my hands-on tips.

Finding the right paper

The perfect paper should be: glossy, thin, and cheap. The kind of stuff that looks lustrous and shiny when new, but so cheap it quickly turns into pulp when wet. If you ever found a mailbox full of squashy mail on a rainy day, you already know the answer: paper used for most mail advertising and magazines fits perfectly the requisites. I tried pages from the free advertising magazine IEN,catalogues , travel agent’s brochures, TV programme magazine, and all worked well. I don’t expect great difference using paper from most magazines. As a rule of thumb, if humidity in your bathroom turns your magazine in bad shape, it should be OK. If the humidity on your fingertips is enough to feel a sticky sensation while touching its gloss coating, it should be OK. Feel free to experiment: almost any glossy magazine paper will work. I like thin paper over thick one, and prefer recycled paper over new paper.

Paper preparation

I discard pages heavily printed, preferring pages with normal-size text on white background. Although ink usually does not transfer on the PCB, heavy print of headlines sometimes accumulate so much ink that some gets on copper.
Cut the paper to a size suitable for your printer. Try to get straight, clean cuts, as jagged borders and paper dust are more prone to clog printer mechanism. An office cutter is ideal, but also a blade-cutter and a steady hand work well.
Be careful to remove all staples, bindings, gadget glue or similar stuff, as they can damage printer’s drum and mechanisms.

Printer setup

Laser printers are not designed for handling thin, cheap paper, so we must help them feeding the sheets manually instead of using the paper tray. Selecting a straight paper path minimizes the chances of clogging. This is usually achieved setting the printer as if it were printing on envelopes.

You want to put as much toner on paper as possible, so disable “toner economy modes” and set printer properties to the maximum contrast and blackness possible. You want to print your PCB to exact size, so disable any form of scaling/resizing (e.g. “fit to page”). If your printer driver allows, set it to “center to page” as it helps to get the right position using a non-standard size sheet.

Printing

Disclaimer: your laser printer is not designed to handle this kind of paper. Feeding your printer with paper other than special laser printer paper could damage it and potentially voids the warranty. So you are warned: do it at your own risk.
Print your PCB layout as usual, except you must setup the printer as described above and you must print a mirrored layout.

This is my PC thermometer circuit printed on IEN magazine paper. Notice that it is a mirror image of the circuit (the word PCTHERM is reversed). Placing some text helps recognizing when the layout is mirrored. Text will read straight again once the image is transferred on copper. If you look it very closely, you can see that toner is not opaque enough to 100% cover the words underneath, but this won’t affect etching.

 

How to cut raw material

PCB material is fibreglass like, and a trick to cut it effortlessly is to score a groove with a blade cutter or a glass cutter. The groove weakens the board to the point that bending it manually breaks it along the groove line. This method is applicable only when cutting the whole board along a line that goes from side to side, that is you can’t cut a U or L shaped board with it.
For small boards, I lock the PCB material in a vice, aligning vice edge and cut line. I use an all-aluminium vice which is soft and doesn’t scratch copper, if you use a steel vice protect copper surface with soft material.
Using the vice as a guide, I score BOTH board sides with a blade cutter (be careful) or another sharp, hardened tool (e.g. a small screwdriver tip). Ensure to scratch edge-to-edge. Repeat this step 5-6 times on each side.
Bend the board. If groove is deep enough, the board will break before reaching a 30 degrees bend. It will break quite abruptly so be prepared and protect your hands with gloves.
To make paper alignment easier, cut a piece of PCB material that is larger (at least 10mm/0,39 inch for each side) than the final PCB.

Cleaning the board for transfer

It is essential that the copper surface is spotlessly clean and free from grease that could adverse etching. To remove oxide from copper surface, I use the abrasive spongy scrubs sold for kitchen cleaning. It’s cheaper than ultra-fine sandpaper and reusable many times. Metallic wool sold for kitchen cleaning purposes also works. Thoroughly scrub copper surface until really shiny. Rinse and dry with a clean cloth or kitchen paper.

TIP: "...I had a bar of "Solvol" soap in the kitchen cupboard, This stuff is like normal soap but with sand mixed in with it or something. Mechanics and so on often use it as its really good at cleaning the grease and stuff off your hands. It is like soap with built-in sandpaper. Not much effort with some Solvol soap cleaned copper right up..."

Robert Davidson

 

Preparing for transfer

To make paper alignment easy, cut excess paper around one corner (leave a small margin though). Leave plenty of paper on the other sides to fix the paper to the desk. As the board is larger than the final PCB, there is large margin for easy placement of paper on copper.

Turn the iron to its maximum heat (COTTON position) and turn off steam, if present. While the iron warms up, position the materials on the table. Don’t work on an ironing board as its soft surface makes it difficult to apply pressure and keep the PCB in place. Protect table surface with flat, heat-resistant material (e.g. old magazines) and place the board on top, copper face up. Lock the board in place with double-adhesive tape. Position the PCB printout over the copper surface, toner down, and align paper and board corners. Lock the paper with scotch tape along one side only. This way, you can flip the paper in and out instantly.

Iron it!

Flip out the paper, and preheat copper surface placing the iron on top of it for 30 seconds. Remove the iron, flip back paper into its previous position over the copper. It is essential that paper does not slip from its position. You can also cover with a second sheet of blank paper to distribute pressure more evenly. Keep moving the iron, while pressing down as evenly as you can, for about one minute.
Remove the iron and let the board to cool down.

Peeling

 

This is the fun part. When the board is cool enough to touch, trim excess paper and immerge in water. Let it soak for 1 minute, or until paper softens.
 

Cheap paper softens almost immediately, turning into a pulp that is easy to remove rubbing with your thumb. Keep rubbing until all paper dissolves (usually less than 1 minute). Don’t be afraid to scratch toner, if it has transferred correctly it forms a very strong bond with copper.
 

The board with all paper removed. It is OK if some microscopic paper fibres remain on the toner (but remove any fibre from copper), giving it a silky feeling. It is normal that these fibres turn a little white when dry.
 

Magnified view of the tracks, these are 1206 pads and SO8 SMT pads, connected by 20 mils tracks. Some white fibres show up on the black toner surface.

The hanger tool

.

The optimal way to etch is keeping the PCB horizontal and face-down (and possibly stirring). This way dissolved copper gets rapidly dispersed in the solution by gravity. Stirring keeps its concentration even, so the solution close to the PCB does not saturate and etching proceeds quicker. Unfortunately it is not easy to keep the PCB in place in an highly corrosive acid. This hanger is my best attempt to solve the problem. I made it with plastic-insulated copper wire. The wire must have a rigid core, but must be also easy enough to adapt to the board by hand without tools. Core diameter of 1 to 2mm is fine. Give it the form of an “arm” (the handle) ending with 4 “fingers”.

Each finger has a ring tip that fits a corner of the board. Close fingers around board corners: now you can use the handle to splash the board into the etching solution, stir, and inspect how etching proceeds.

Etching

There are many alternatives for etching liquids, and you can use the one that suits your taste. I use ferric chloride (the brown stuff): it’s cheap, can be reused many times, and doesn’t require heating. Actually, moderate heating can speed up etching, but I find it reasonably fast also at room temperature (10…15 minutes).
The down side of this stuff is that it’s incredibly messy. It permanently stains everything it gets in contact with: not only clothes or skin (never wear your best clothes when working with it!), but also furniture, floor tiles, tools, everything. It is concentrated enough to corrode any metal – including your chrome-plated sink accessories. Even vapours are highly corrosive: don’t forget the container open or it will turn any tool or metallic shelf nearby into rust.
For etching, I place the container on the floor (some scrap cardboard or newspaper to protect the floor from drops). I fit the board on the hanger, and submerge the PCB. Stir occasionally by waving the hanger.

First impression may be that nothing happens, but in less than 10 minutes some copper is removed, making first tracks to appear. From now on, stir continuously and check often, as the process completes rather quickly. You don’t want to overdo it, otherwise thinner tracks start being eroded sideways. As a rule of thumb, stop 30 seconds after you don’t see any copper leftovers over large areas.

Rinse the board with plenty, plenty, plenty of water
I store the etching solution in the same plastic box used for etching. When the job is done I just put the hermetic lid on. To further minimize risks of leakage, I put the container inside the bigger one I use for rinsing, put the second lid, and store it in a safe place.

Disclaimer: These are dangerous chemicals. Always read the labels that come with the solution, handle it wearing protective gloves and goggles, keep windows open, don’t inhale the fumes.

Finishing touches

A few drops of thinner (nail polish remover works well) on a pinch of cotton wool will remove completely the toner, bringing back the copper surface. Rinse carefully and dry with a clean cloth or kitchen paper.
Trim to final size and refine edges with sandpaper.

You will like it

The best thing about this method is that it makes possible to start with a great idea at 11:00 pm and have your prototype working by midnight. It is so straightforward that you will use it more often than you think.
The second great thing is that this method is good enough for larger SMT parts. Actually, once you get some practice soldering, SMT parts are easier to work/experiment with, and don’t require drilling the holes.
So far, results are comparable with what I was used to get with UV sensitive boards. The board in this tutorial had 20 mils wide tracks: the word “PCTHERM” is 40 mils high and made from 10 mils tracks, and the three pads in the middle are spaced only10 mils apart.
I don’t know how the method scales to large board sizes, as I make only small boards.
A frequent question is how to make double-sided PCBs. I don't find practical ironing two sides at once, as it is difficult to get consistent temperature. Dal Wheeler uses a document laminator for the purpose, and has put together an excellent tutorial.

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Wall Following Robot Microcontroller Atmega16

I Made Autonomous Wall Following Robot Using Microcontroller Atmega16

Cellphone Operated Robot

INTRODUCTION

Conventionally, wireless-controlled robots use RF circuits,which have the drawbacks of limited working range, limited frequency range and limited control. Use of a mobile phone for robotic control can overcome these limitations. It provides the advantages of robust control, working range as large as the coverage area of the service provider,no interference with other controllers and up to twelve controls.Although the appearance and capabilities of robots vary vastly, all robots share the features of a mechanical, movable structure under some form of control. The control of robot involves three distinct phases: reception, processing and action. Generally, the preceptors are sensors mounted on the robot, processing is done by the on-board microcontroller or processor, and the task (action) is performed using motors or with some other actuators.


PROJECT OVERVIEW

 In this project, the robot is controlled by a mobile phone that makes a call to the mobile phone attached to the robot. In the course of a call, if any button is pressed,a tone corresponding to the button pressed is heard at the other end of the call. This tone is called ‘dual-tone multiple-frequency’ (DTMF) tone. The robot perceives this DTMF tone with the help of the phone stacked in the robot. The received tone is processed by the ATmega16 microcontroller with the help of DTMF decoder MT8870. The decoder decodes the DTMF tone into its equivalent binary digit and this binary number is sent to the microcontroller.The microcontroller is preprogrammed to take a decision for any given input and outputs its decision to motor drivers in order to drive the motors for forward or backward motion or a turn. The mobile that makes a call to the mobile phone stacked in the robot acts as a remote. So this simple robotic project does not require the construction of receiver and transmitter units. DTMF signaling is used fr telephone signaling over the line in the voice-frequency band to the call switching centre. The version of DTMF used for telephone tone dialing is known as ‘Touch-Tone.’DTMF assigns a specific frequency (consisting of two separatetones) to each key so that it can easily be identified by the electronic circuit. The signal generated by the DTMF encoder is a direct algebraic summation, in real time, of the amplitudes of two sine (cosine)waves of different frequencies, i.e., pressing ‘5’ will send a tone made by adding 1336 Hz and 770 Hz to the other end of the line. The tones and assignments in a DTMF system are shown in Table I.

 SCEMATIC OF CELLPHONE OPERATED LANDROVER

CIRCUIT DESCRIPTION

Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the microcontroller-based mobile phoneoperated land rover. The important components of this rover are a DTMF decoder, microcontroller and motor driver. An MT8870 series DTMF decoder is used here. All types of the MT8870 series use digital counting techniques to detect and decode all the 16 DTMF tone pairs into a 4-bit code output. The built-in dial tone rejection circuit eliminates the need for pre-filtering. When the input signal given at pin 2 (IN-) in single-ended input configuration is recognised to be effective, the correct 4-bit decode signal of the DTMF tone is transferred to Q1 (pin 11) through Q4 (pin 14) outputs. Table II shows the DTMF data output table of MT8870. Q1 through Q4 outputs of the DTMF decoder (IC1) are connected to port pins PA0 through PA3 of ATmega16 microcontroller (IC2) after inversion by N1 through N4,respectively. The ATmega16 is a low-power, 8-bit, CMOS microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. It provides the following features: 16 kB of in-system programmable Flash program memory with read-while-write capabilities, 512 bytes of EEPROM, 1kB SRAM, 32 general-purpose input/output (I/O) lines and 32 general-purpose working registers. All the 32 registers re directly connected to the arithmetic logic unit, allowing two independent registers to be accessed in one single instruction executed in one clock cycle. The resulting architecture is more code-efficient. Outputs from port pins PD0 through PD3 and PD7 of the microcontroller are fed to inputs IN1 through IN4 and enable pins (EN1 and EN2) of motor driver L293D, espectively, to drive two geared DC motors. Switch S1 is used for manual reset. The microcontroller output is not sufficient to drive the DC motors, so current drivers are required for motor rotation. The L293D is a quad, high-current, half-H driver designed to provide bidirectional drive currents of up to 600 mA at voltages from 4.5V to 36V. It makes it easier to drive the DC motors. The L293D consists of four drivers. Pin IN1 through IN4 and OUT1 through OUT4 are input and output pins, respectively, of driver 1 through driver 4. Drivers 1 and 2, and drivers 3 and 4 are enabled by enable pin 1 (EN1) and pin 9 (EN2), respectively. When enable input EN1 (pin 1) is high, drivers 1 and 2 are enabled and the outputs corresponding to their inputs are active. Similarly, enable input EN2 (pin 9) enables drivers 3 and 4. An actual-size, single-side PCB for cellphone-operated land rover is shown in Fig. 4 and its component layout in Fig. 5.

 PCB LAYOUT FOR CELLPHONE OPERATED LANDROVER

SOFTWARE DESCRIPTION

The software is written in ‘C’ language and compiled using CodeVision AVR ‘C’ compiler. The source program is ed into hex code by the compiler. Burn this hex code into ATmega16 AVR microcontroller.The source program is well commented and easy to understand. First include the register name defined specifically for ATmega16 and also declare the variable. Set port A as the input and port D as the output. The program
will run forever by using ‘while’ loop. Under ‘while’ loop, read port A and test the received input using ‘switch’ statement. The corresponding data will output at port D after testing of the received data.
WORKING

In order to control the robot, you need to make a call to the cell phone attached to the robot (through head phone) from any phone, which sends DTMF tunes on pressing the numeric buttons. The cell phone in the robot is kept in ‘auto answer’ mode. (If the mobile does not have the auto answering facility, receive the call by ‘OK’ key on the rover-connected mobile and then made it in hands-free mode.) So after a ring, the cellphone accepts the call. Now you may press any button on your mobile to perform actions as listed in Table III. The DTMF tones thus produced are received by the cellphone in the robot. These tones are fed to the circuit by the headset of the
cellphone. The MT8870 decodes the received tone and sends the equivalent binary number to the microcontroller. According to the program in the microcontroller, the robot starts moving.When you press key ‘2’ (binary equivalent 00000010) on your mobile phone, the microcontroller outputs ‘10001001’ binary equivalent. Port pins PD0, PD3 and PD7 are high. The high output at PD7 of the microcontroller drives the motor driver (L293D). Port pins PD0 and PD3 drive motors M1 and M2 in forward direction (as per Table III). Similarly, motors M1 and M2 move for left turn, right turn, backward motion and stop condition as per Table III.
 CONSTRUCTION

When constructing any robot, one major mechanical constraint is the number there a two-wheel drive or a four-wheel ive. Though four-wheel drive is more complex than two-wheel drive, it provides more torque and good control. Two-wheel drive, on the other hand, is very easy to construct. Top view of a four-wheel-driven land rover is shown in Fig. 3. The chassis used in this model is a 10×18cm2 sheet made up of parax. Motors are fixed to the bottom of this sheet and the circuit is affixed firmly on top of the sheet. A cellphone is also mounted on the sheet as shown in the picture. In the four-wheel drive system, the two motors on a side are controlled in parallel. So a single L293D driver IC can drive the rover. For this robot, beads affixed with glue act as support wheels.

PROGRAM FOR CELLPHONE OPERATED LANDROVER
Download:Code Files

Component Required:

IC1 -                    MT8870 DTMF decoder
IC2 -                    ATmega16 AVR microcontroller
IC3 -                    L293D motor driver
IC4 -                    74LS04 NOT gate
D1 -                     1N4007 rectifier diode
R1, R2 -                100-kilo-ohm
R3 -                     330-kilo-ohm
R4-R8 -                10-kilo-ohm
C1 -                     0.47μF ceramic disk
C2, C3, C5, C6 -    22pF ceramic disk
C4 -                     0.1μF ceramic disk
XTAL1 -                3.57MHz crystal
XTAL2 -                12MHz crystal
S1 -                     Push-to-on switch
M1, M2 -               6V, 50-rpm geared DC motor
Batt. -                  6V, 4.5Ah battery


Thank You