Hacker Tactic: Single-PCB Panels

July 17, 2024 by Arya Voronova 35 Comments

Ordering a PCB? Two of them? Three? Five? For about eight years now, I’ve been regularly ordering large numbers of different PCBs, and, naturally, have developed a toolkit to make things smoother. One trick is PCB panelization, and you should really know about it.

You might’ve encountered PCB panels already. Perhaps, if you order PCBA at a fab, you will get your board returned in a whole new form-factor, with rails on the sides that you have to snap off before your PCB is usable. Those rails are used so that your PCBs are easier to handle during assembly, but that’s far from the only reason why you would make a panel.

If you need multiple pieces of a PCB, your fab may say that building 50 pcs is classified as “large batch” and that takes longer than 30 days, which delays your entire PCB order. I’ve been there, five years ago, running out of time right before Chinese New Year. The fix was simple – I made a 2×2 panel and ordered that in quantity of 10-15. Panelization might be a little more expensive, or maybe even cheaper, but, most importantly, it will be faster.

In a few hours’ time, I sat down, figured out that KiCad has built-in features for panelization, and ordered panels instead of separate PCBs. Thanks to that, I made the Chinese New Year deadline that year and could successfully restock my store, letting me earn a fair bit of money instead of keeping a popular product out-of-stock – ultimately, helping my family stay up on rent that month.

Panelization lets you hack around many PCB ordering and assembly limitations, and I’ve only gotten started – there’s way way more! For now, let’s sort out panelizing multiples of the same PCB. As long as your boards are using KiCad (or KiCad-converted from Eagle/EasyEDA/Altium/gerbers), there’s no better software than KiKit.

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Five Ways To Repair Broken PCB Traces

July 14, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

When everything used wires, it was easy to splice them or replace them. Not so much with PC boards, but everyone has their favorite method for repairing a broken trace. [Mr. SolderFix] has his five favorite ways, as you can see in the video below.

Of course, before you can repair a trace, you probably have to expose it since most boards have solder mask now. Unless you plan to shut the trace at both ends, exposing the actual trace is probably the first step.

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Watch SLS 3D Printed Parts Become Printed Circuits

June 20, 2024 by Donald Papp 36 Comments

[Ben Krasnow] of the Applied Science channel recently released a video demonstrating his process for getting copper-plated traces reliably embedded into sintered nylon powder (SLS) 3D printed parts, and shows off a variety of small test boards with traces for functional circuits embedded directly into them.

Here’s how it works: The SLS 3D printer uses a laser to fuse powdered nylon together layer by layer to make a plastic part. But to the nylon powder, [Ben] has added a small amount of a specific catalyst (copper chromite), so that prints contains this catalyst. Copper chromite is pretty much inert until it gets hit by a laser, but not the same kind of laser that sinters the nylon powder. That means after the object is 3D printed, the object is mostly nylon with a small amount of (inert) copper chromite mixed in. That sets the stage for what comes next.

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2024 Business Card Challenge: PCB Business Cards For Everybody

June 19, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 21 Comments

PCB business cards for electronics engineers might be very much old news in our circles, but they are still cool, not seen too much in the wild, and frankly inaccessible to those in other industries. For their entry into the 2024 Business Card Challenge, [Dima Shlenkevitch] is helping a little to alleviate this by providing a set of design examples and worked costs with suppliers.

Original green is still the cheapest option.

[Dima] lists key features every PCB business card should include, such as the expected thickness, restrictions for placing NFC components, and some aesthetics tips. Make sure to choose a supplier that allows you to remove their order number from the manufactured PCB, or it will look out of place.

Ordering PCBs with these specifications to keep costs reasonable requires effort, so [Dima] offers some example designs along with the results. If you want to have pretty gold lettering and graphics, you will need ENiG plating, increasing the price. Non-standard solder mask colors can also raise the price.

Will this help with the practical aspects of driving the PCB design software and actually placing the order? Obviously not, but the information provided gives you a leg up on some of the decisions so you don’t go down an expensive rabbit hole.

Restoring A Vintage CGA Card With Homebrew HASL

June 12, 2024 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate that what [Adrian] is doing in the video below isn’t actual hot air solder leveling. But we thought the results of his card-edge connector restoration on a CGA video card from the early 80s was pretty slick, and worth keeping in mind for other applications.

The back story is that [Adrian], of “Digital Basement” YouTube fame, came across an original IBM video card from the early days of the IBM-PC. The card was unceremoniously dumped, probably due to the badly corroded pins on the card-edge bus connector. The damage appeared to be related to a leaking battery — the corrosion had that sickly look that seems to only come from the guts of batteries — leading him to try cleaning the formerly gold-plated pins. He chose naval jelly rust remover for the job; for those unfamiliar with this product, it’s mostly phosphoric acid mixed with thickeners and is used as a rust remover.

The naval jelly certainly did the trick, but left the gold-plated pins a little worse for the wear. Getting them back to their previous state wasn’t on the table, but protecting them with a thin layer of solder was easy enough. [Adrian] used liquid rosin flux and a generous layer of 60:40 solder, which was followed by removing the excess with desoldering braid. That worked great and got the pins on both sides of the board into good shape.

[Adrian] also mentioned a friend who recommended using toilet paper to wick up excess solder, but sadly he didn’t demonstrate that method. Sounds a little sketchy, but maybe we’ll give it a try. As for making this more HASL-like, maybe heating up the excess solder with an iron and blasting the excess off with some compressed air would be worth a try.

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BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels

June 11, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s something other than a car using the road. Generally, simple flashing LEDs for both the front and the rear is a pretty good start, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more lights to the bicycle or increase their brightness. On the other hand, if you want to add some style to your bicycle lighting system then this persistence of vision (POV) display called the BikeBeamer from [locxter] might be just the thing.

The display uses four LED strips, each housed in their own 3D printed case which are installed at 90-degree angles from one another in between the spokes of a standard bicycle wheel. An ESP32 sits at the base of one of the strips and is responsible for storing the image and directing the four displays. This is a little more complex than a standard POV display as it’s also capable of keeping up with the changing rotational speeds of the bicycle wheels when in use. The design also incorporates batteries so that no wires need to route from the bike frame to the spinning wheels.

This is an ongoing project for [locxter] as well, meaning that there are some planned upgrades even to this model that should be in the pipe for the future. Improving the efficiency of the code will hopefully allow for more complex images and even animations to be displayed in the future, and there are also some plans to improve the PCB as well with all surface-mount components. There are a few other ways to upgrade your bike’s lighting as well, and we could recommend this heads-up headlight display to get started.

M1 Development Board From Scraps

May 18, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 29 Comments

Apple is fairly notorious for building devices that are difficult to repair, but with the right tools it’s often not completely impossible to circumvent some of their barriers. As they say, every lock has a key. [dosdude1] has wanted a specific M1 development board for a while now and has been slowly piecing together everything he needs to cobble one together, and finally got this unit running despite many roadblocks put in his way by Apple.

The development kit is a Developer Transition Kit or “DTK” meant for developers during Apple’s transition from Intel chips to their own in-house ARM-based M1 platform. This particular version is in a Mac Mini form factor but it has a few hurdles to clear before it powers on. First, the board was cut in a critical location that shorted out many of the PCB layers, so this had to be carefully filed down to remove the shorts. It was also missing a few tiny surface mount components and a NAND chip, but these were scavenged from other scrapped parts and assembled into a fully working machine.

There are a number of other non-physical problems to solve here as well, too. Apple coded their NAND chips to work with specific WiFi modules so if these aren’t programmed to work together the computer will get stuck in a boot loop. But with that and a few other details out of the way [dosdude1] finally has his DTK up and running in a 2018 Mac Mini chassis, right down to the working power LEDs. We’ve seen all kinds of PCB damage before (although not often quite this intricate) and even PCBs repaired that were snapped in half.

Thanks to [CodeAsm] for the tip!

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