A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate. The video showing this process generated a lot of interest and no fewer than 20 tips to the Hackaday tips line, which continued to come in dribs and drabs this week. In a world where low-cost, fast-turn PCB fabs exist, the amount of effort that went into this method makes little sense, and readers certainly made that known in the comments section. Given that the blokes who pulled this off are gearheads with no hobby electronics background, it kind of made their approach a little more understandable, but it still left a ton of practical questions about how they pulled it off. And now a new video from the aptly named Bad Obsession Motorsports attempts to explain what went on behind the scenes.
To be quite honest, although the amount of work they did to make these boards was impressive, especially the part where they got someone to create a custom roll of fluxless tin-silver solder, we have to admit to being a little let down by the explanation. The mechanical bits, where they temporarily modified the CNC mill with what amounts to a 3D printer extruder and hot end to melt and dispense the solder, wasn’t really the question we wanted answered. We were far more interested in the details of getting the solder traces to stick to the board as they were dispensed and how the board acted when components were soldered into the rivets used as vias. Sadly, those details were left unaddressed, so unless they decide to make yet another video, we suppose we’ll just have to learn to live with the mystery.
What do mushrooms have to do with data security? Until this week, we’d have thought the two were completely unrelated, but then we spotted this fantastic article on “Computers Are Bad” that spins the tale of Iron Mountain, which people in the USA might recognize as a large firm that offers all kinds of data security products, from document shredding to secure offsite storage and data backups. We always assumed the “Iron Mountain” thing was simply marketing, but the company did start in an abandoned iron mine in upstate New York, where during the early years of the Cold War, it was called “Iron Mountain Atomic Storage” and marketed document security to companies looking for business continuity in the face of atomic annihilation. As Cold War fears ebbed, the company gradually rebranded itself into the information management entity we know today. But what about the mushrooms? We won’t ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that IT people aren’t the only ones that are fed shit and kept in the dark.
Do you like thick traces? We sure do, at least when it comes to high-current PCBs. We’ve seen a few boards with really impressive traces and even had a Hack Chat about the topic, so it was nice to see Mark Hughes’ article on design considerations for heavy copper boards. The conventional wisdom with high-current applications seems to be “the more copper, the better,” but Mark explains why that’s not always the case and how trace thickness and trace spacing both need to be considered for high-current applications. It’s pretty cool stuff that we hobbyists don’t usually have to deal with, but it’s good to see how it’s done.
We imagine that there aren’t too many people out there with fond memories of Visual Basic, but back when it first came out in the early 1990s, the idea that you could actually make a Windows PC do Windows things without having to learn anything more than what you already knew from high school computer class was pretty revolutionary. By all lights, it was an awful language, but it was enabling for many of us, so much so that some of us leveraged it into successful careers. Visual Basic 6 was pretty much the end of the line for the classic version of the language, before it got absorbed into the whole .NET thing. If you miss that 2008 feel, here’s a VB6 virtual machine to help you recapture the glory days.
And finally, in this week’s “Factory Tour” segment we have a look inside a Japanese aluminum factory. The video mostly features extrusion, a process we’ve written about before, as well as casting. All of it is fascinating stuff, but what really got us was the glow of the molten aluminum, which we’d never really seen before. We’re used to the incandescent glow of molten iron or even brass and copper, but molten aluminum has always just looked like — well, liquid metal. We assumed that was thanks to its relatively low melting point, but apparently, you really need to get aluminum ripping hot for casting processes. Enjoy.
Inre: Underground shelters
A decade or so ago someone was trying to sell an old missile silo complex on an Internet auction site for over a million dollars.
But I suspect that to make it livable one would have to spend a lot more money than that removing lead paint, asbestos, and spilled PCBs, before installing new electrical, water, sewer, air handling equipment, backup generator, then they could add things needed for living, such as kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living area, and storage for long term occupation.
Not a cheap venture.
It’s a lot more work than just that – there’s a YT channel where someone was documenting their missile silo build, and the very first thing to deal with was draining all the water out of it!
https://www.youtube.com/@GTsTitanRanch
also the YT channel “death wears bunny slippers”
There’s no mystery about how the solder sticks to the PCB. All that’s required is the right kind of solder – 96% tin/silver, with no flux, as per the video. Tin is sticky enough and with no flux it has fairly low surface tension so it stays where it’s put. Adhesion won’t be very high, but it doesn’t have to be since it’s not under significant mechanical stress.
Also, pcb via rivets are an old technique, but quite standard and well understood. I reckon they just work without hassle, otherwise Richard would have said something.
“Adhesion won’t be very high, but it doesn’t have to be since it’s not under significant mechanical stress.”
It’s going to be in the dashboard of a classic car…
This already was gone over before: once the layout is finalized they are ordering a PCB.
Even more commenters every time this comes up that refuse to actually engage with the content and instead make a snarky statement to prove themselves smarter than their dog.
This is a prototyping process, not the final board they’ll use! The whole build has required constant reworking of previous parts over time, so one of their justifications of putting the effort into this was to give them a means to easily tweak a build live (also, clearly, because Richard got super interested in the side project.)
Once they have a final design then they’ll just get a professional board made.
Okay, I wasn’t paying enough attention.
Thanks.
In the original gague cluster Bad Obsession Motorsports video, they tell us about the coating on the FR4 board….
They make mention of the dirty board after reworking due to dirt and dust sticking to the spray adhesive they used to stick the printed traces down.
i figure the whole thing was a matter of do now think later. a lot of us mull the idea around in our head for months even years before we even order parts. but you got a mill there doing nothing and a need for something, so you put two and two together and get er dun. its a respectable approach.
If you pay closer attention you realise that’s only when they’re doing the trick of printing traces on a separate board, lifting them off with a blade, then transferring them to the main board. Printing directly onto the PCB doesn’t use the adhesive.
I have used VB6 quite a lot (but also VBA, Word 6.0 had more internals exposed to programming than any later version), but never got much into .NET – admittedly, mostly because I had less use for programming in general and less time for playful endeavors… Still, I found VB6 much easier to use, I wonder how current .NET compares to that?
Way back when, VB6 and Crystal Reports made me a good amount of money, it was really accessible and worked very well for what it was, I eventually moved on to the various Borland ‘Builder’ products and then gave up as my career took me away from coding for Windows, the latest versions of the various MS products are incredibly complex and feel like a high bar to entry level coders.
Agree on VB6 and Crystal.
I found very little that I couldn’t do back in the day with VB6. On rare occasion, I resorted to the Windows API. For user oriented business and industrial applications VB6 did the job. When I found out it couldn’t do “true object oriented programming”, I didn’t care.
When .NET came around and VB6 was shunned among the real programmers, I figured I’d stick with VB.NET thinking that I’d already be familiar with the syntax, or something. Nope. Tried it for a while and moved to C# as there was more community knowledge and support.
Admittedly, I let myself get left behind to some extent, but I still don’t feel like I need hardcore object oriented programming or advanced methodologies very often. I get it, but for most of what I do, it feels like a ton of overhead and prevents me from even getting started most of the time. I never got past the point where I could focus on solving the problem rather than fighting with the environment. I’ve found that Python can generally do the simplistic instrumentation and visualization utilities that I need to build once in a while in my current non-programmer role.
I haven’t yet found a Python screen designer that works anywhere as straight forward and simple as the old VB6 form designer. The default events worked fine almost always, without the pain of having to bind them. Maybe I’m just lazy.
Being thrifty even with other people’s money, I like that I don’t have to eat a Visual $tudio license for my little Python projects. Of course, one could get by with VS.CODE these days for the basics.
i did vb in high school and never really used it sense. when i need a quick and dirty window application i usually break out lua and use iup for the gui. most people would grab python but im not most people.
Used VB6 at a startup about 20 years ago, the workflow was pretty quick. The IDE was simple to use and having break points with step and continue really made the debug process swift. If you needed more horsepower from a particular algorithm you could write a DLL and make API calls. For the prototyping and small production runs we did it was a reasonable solution
Very fond memories of VB6. I was self taught with QBasic (Dad got me started, and the built-in help was awesome). I was very happy when we got Visual Basic and I could make Windows programs instead of just (uncompiled) stuff for DOS.
I eventually did some VB.NET and C#, but these days I really don’t need to write anything more complex than a BASH or Python script.
But VB will always hold a special place, for being the first place I could write “real” programs.
I still remember using VB (version 4 or so from memory) back in the day in high school programming courses (and getting busted by the teacher for trying to pirate VB off the computer labs).
It probably already exists but if it doesn’t, someone should make a thing that is source compatible with old VB programs but runs on modern 64-bit systems (or even alternate platforms)