Boldport Tribute To Bob Pease

March 1, 2016 by Jenny List 33 Comments

We have lost something in PCB design over the last few decades. If you open up a piece of electronics from the 1960s you’ll see why. A PCB from that era is a thing of beauty, an organic mass of curving traces, an expression of the engineer’s art hand-crafted in black crêpe paper tape on transparent acetate. Now by comparison a PCB is a functional drawing of precise angles and parallel lines created in a CAD package, and though those of us who made PCBs in both eras welcome the ease of software design wholeheartedly we have to admit; PCBs just ain’t pretty any more.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. Notable among the rebels are Boldport, whose latest board, a tribute to the late linear IC design legend [Bob Pease], slipped out this month. They use their own PCBmodE design software to create beautiful boards as works of art with the flowing lines you’d expect from a PCB created the old-fashioned way.

The board itself is an update to an earlier Boldport design, and features Pease’s LM331 voltage to frequency converter IC converting light intensity to frequency and flashing an LED. It’s one of the application circuits from the datasheet with a little extra to drive the LED. Best of all the kit is a piece of open-source hardware, so you can find all its resources on GitHub.

We are fans of Boldport’s work here at Hackaday, and it should come as no surprise that we have featured them before. From one of their other kits through several different pieces of PCB wall art, to their work making an appearance in Marie Claire magazine they have graced these pages several times, and we hope this latest board will be one of many more.

Beautiful And Bizarre Boards

January 28, 2016 by Nava Whiteford 49 Comments

weirdboard — An odd board (piezo coupler), fabbed by OSHPark.

Recently I’ve been getting curious about interesting PCB shapes. In the past I’ve always used simple Polygons, perhaps rounding out the corners to make the design a little more aesthetically pleasing. The board to the right was my introduction to the possibilities of oddly shaped boards. It’s designed to couple with a piezo buzzer (used as an actuator). I’ve been planning to have it fabricated out of FPC (Flexible Printed Circuits), but with fabrication being so cheap I sent it to OSHPark to see what they’d make of it. OSHPark doesn’t have hard specs around internal routing, but in my experience they’re up to try anything (and they’re quality is always great). The width of the prongs on the PCB shown is 5mm. I figured it was a risk, and that it was likely the FR4 could break, but it came back great!

This has led me to the realization that my boards could look much more exciting than they do currently, and that our highly optimized modern PCB fabrication process provides a lot of room for experimentation. This article will discuss some of the options available when creating non-traditional PCBs.

Continue reading “Beautiful And Bizarre Boards” →

Circuit Love With Multicolor Solder Masks

February 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

The cheapest PCBs – and therefore most common – are green solder mask with white silkscreen. It works, but it’s also incredibly boring. This is the way things were done up until a few years ago with the explosion of board houses trying to compete for your Yuan, and now getting a red, yellow, black, blue, green, and even OSH purple is possible. This doesn’t mean multiple solder masks aren’t possible, as [Saar] demonstrates with his demonstration of multicolor solder masks and circuit love.

We’ve seen a lot of [Saar]’s designs, including a mixing desk, a cordwood puzzle, and an engineer’s emergency business card, but so far his artistic pieces have been decidedly monochromatic. For this build, [Saar] teamed up with Eurocircuits to create a board that exploits their capabilities.

Althought Eurocircuits has PCB PIXture, a tool for putting graphics on PCBs, [Saar] made this with his own tool, PCBmodE. The design of both the red and yellow variants are abstract, and only meant to be a demonstration of what can be done with multicolor solder mask. It looks great with five backlit LEDs, and with an acrylic top and bottom, makes a great coaster or art piece.

We like [Saar’s] work so much that we put his Cordwood puzzle in the Hackaday Store.

‘Nutclough’ Circuit Board Design Is Stylishly Amplified

November 18, 2014 by Sarah Petkus 17 Comments

Though there is nothing wrong with the raw functionality of a plain rectangular PCB, boards that work an edge of aesthetic flare into their layout leave a lasting impression on those who see them. This is the philosophy of circuit artist [Saar Drimer] of Boldport, and the reason why he was commissioned by Calrec Audio to create the look for their anniversary edition amplifier kit. We’ve seen project’s by [Saar] before and this ‘Nutclough18’ amplifier is another great example of his artistic handy work.

For the special occasion of their 50th anniversary, Calrec Audio contacted [Saar] requesting he create something a bit more enticing than their standard rectangular design from previous years. With their schematic as a starting point, [Saar] used cardboard to mock-up a few of his ideas in order to get a feel for the placement of the components. Several renditions later, [Saar] decided to implement the exact proportions of the company’s iconic Apollo desk into the heart of the design as an added nod back to the company itself. In the negative space between the lines of the Apollo desk there is a small perforated piece depicting the mill where the Calrec offices are located. The image of the mill makes use of different combinations of copper, silk and solder mask either absent or present to create shading and depth as the light passes through the board. This small piece that would have otherwise been removed as scrap can be snapped off from the body of the PCB and used as a commemorative keychain.

With the battery and speaker mounted behind the completed circuit board, [Saar’s] design succeeds in being a unique memento with a stylish appeal. There is a complete case study with detailed documentation on the Nutclough from cardboard to product on the Boldport website. Here you can also see some other examples of their gorgeous circuit art, or checkout their opensource software to help in designing your own alternative PCBs.

Turning PCBs Into Art

March 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

Designing a circuit, laying out a board, and sending it off to be fabbed is so easy anyone can do it. A lot of people are, in fact, and with the traditional tools like KiCAD and Eagle, a lot of different boards look very, very similar. You could always add some cool silkscreen graphics to your board to make it stand out, but [Saar] has a better solution: it’s called PCBmodE, and it allows you to draw circuits artistically instead of the 45° angles we’ve become so accustomed to.

PCBmodE takes the parts, pads, signals, and vias for boards stored in JSON files and converts them to an SVG representation. The file is then routed (manually, but [Saar] is working on automated routing) and Gerberized so it can be sent off to a production house.

You can grab PCBmodE over on bitbucket, but right now it’s still a very early version. Vias and copper pours are working, but [Saar] has only fabbed this board so far.