Hand Depanelizer Gets Pneumatic Upgrade

July 21, 2020 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

In high volume production, smaller PCBs are often “panelized” so that multiple copies can be shuffled through assembly as a single piece. Each board is attached to the panel with a few strategically placed tabs, not unlike the sprues in a plastic model kit. If you only have to separate a few boards you can simply cut them with a hand nipper, but when you’re doing hundreds or thousands of boards, it quickly becomes impractical.

Which is where [Clough42] found himself recently. Looking to improve the situation without breaking the bank, he decided to automate his trusty hand-held depanelizer tool. The basic idea was to build an actuator that could stand in for his own hand when operating the tool. He already had a pneumatic cylinder that he could power the device with, he just needed to design it.

In the video below, he walks the viewer though his CAD design process for this project. His first step, which is one that’s often overlooked by new players, is creating digital representations of the hardware he’s using. This allows him to quickly design 3D printed parts that have the proper dimensions and clearances to interface with his real-world components. Remember: it’s a lot easier to adapt your 3D model to the components on hand than the other way around.

With the appropriate valves, hoses, and a foot pedal attached to the pneumatic cylinder, he’s able to operate the cutter completely hands-free. He still has to manually move the panel around, but at least it saves him from the repetitive squeezing motion.

With a tool like this and a custom testing jig, you’ll be producing PCBs like the pros in no time.

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1975 Circuit Board Was A Masterpiece Hidden On Your Wrist

July 13, 2020 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

There has been an argument raging for years over whether you should design circuit boards with 45-degree corners or 90-degree corners. Why make them with corners at all? This breathtaking circuit board art is from a digital watch circa 1975.

The Pulsar Calculator Watch was the first of its kind and came along with a stylus to operate the miniscule buttons. The circuit board traces would have been laid out by hand, explaining the gentle curves rather than straight lines. The chip-on-board construction is wild, with the silicon die bonded directly to those traces on multiple chips in this image. There is also a mercury tilt sensor on this model that would have switched the display off when not being held up to view the time (or calculate your tip at the Ritz).

We found working models of this watch for sale online for about $225-350. That’s a steal considering the original list price for these is reported to be $550 ($2600 considering inflation).

The beauty of the PCB artwork is hidden away, not just inside the watch case, but obscured by the plastic battery housing to which those tabs on the right are soldered. Think of how many geeks were lucky enough to have one of these and never realized the beauty within. If you’re looking to unlock more of these hidden masterpieces, check out [Greg Charvat’s] article on collecting and restoring digital wristwatches.

[via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories link dump]

A Desk Calendar With A Difference

July 11, 2020 by Jenny List 9 Comments

With the office computer revolution now many decades old, many of the items that once stood on a typical desk are now part of history. The typewriter, the Rolodex, and the desk calendar have all been subsumed by computers and mobile phones. This electronic desk calendar is perhaps an exception, created as a promotional device for the RT-Thread IoT OS. It features an interesting take on a perpetual calendar, with an array of days spanned by a sliding frame such that any month’s days of the week can be depicted. The days are touch buttons, and can be used to bring up the information on an e-ink display.

Behind it all is a WinnerMicro W600 WiFi-enabled system-on-chip, that runs the aforementioned RT-Thread IoT OS. This OS is a bit of a mystery, according to its Wikipedia page it’s an open-source project from China with ten years of development behind it, but this appears to be the first time we’ve seen it here at Hackaday. Anyone using it?

We like this project though, for its perpetual calendar, and for its re-imagining of a bygone desk accoutrement with an e-ink display to conserve battery. It’s not the first e-ink calendar we’ve seen, this previous one used a Raspberry Pi.

Making PCBs The Easy Way

July 10, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 52 Comments

Building a PCB at home can be fraught. If you’re etching, there are chemicals and the nuances of toner transfer. If you’re milling, getting the surface height just right, and not breaking those pointy little v-cutters is always a challenge. [Robin] has tips for both of these cases, and solves a lot of the common hassles by using a milling machine.

Whether he’s scraping away etch resist or entire copper isolation lines, [Robin] uses a non-spinning scratching tool instead of a v-bit: they’re more robust and cut every bit as well. He’s got tips for using FlatCam and KiCAD to make scratched-out traces. His registration system allows him to get double-sided boards with a minimum of hassle. And as a bonus, he’s doing some experimentation with embedding SMT parts inside the boards as well. Be sure that you check out his whole guide, or just watch the video embedded below.

We’re pretty sure you’ll pick up a trick or two, and maybe you’ll be convinced to bite the bullet and invest in a nice mill. If you’d like a more traditional take on PCB milling, try out our own [Adil Malik]’s guide.

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Live Map Of London Tube Created In PCB And Lights

July 5, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

If you’re a frequent traveler on a public transit system, it can be helpful to know when the trains or buses are arriving and if there are any delays. We might reach for a tablet to mount on the wall, but that relies on keeping the OS, the software, and its library dependancies up to date. For true reliability you’ll need to build directly in hardware, which is exactly what this map of the London tube system uses.

The base map is printed directly on PCB, with LEDs along each of the major routes to indicate the current location of the trains. A few small chips handle the WiFi connection — it appears to our eye to be an ESP8266 — and pulling the information about the trains from the London Underground API (it would be virtually impossible to build everything for this project in hardware). The hardware can be easily reprogrammed, and with the PCB layout this could be adapted for other public transit fairly easily.

Even apart from the philosophical differences on design between hardware and software approaches, we still appreciate the aesthetic of LEDs on PCB. In fact, we’ve seen a whole host of artwork on PCBs ever since the price came down dramatically in the past two decades.

Thanks to [Al] for the tip!

Tidy Laser Cut Packaging For PCBs With KiCAD

July 1, 2020 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

A laser cutter is a useful tool to have in any workshop. While many hackers use them for their cutting abilities, it’s important to remember that they can be great as engravers, too. [Wrickert] was well aware of this when he set his to work, producing attractive packaging for his Tindie orders.

[Wrickert] sells a variety of small PCB-based devices on Tindie, and it’s nice to have something to package them up with, rather than just sending a bare board. To do this quickly and effectively, KiCAD is used to help generate the packaging from the original PCB geometry itself. The board outlines are exported as an SVG file, reopened in KiCAD, and then used to create the required cardboard parts. The laser can then also be used to engrave the cardboard too.

It’s a tidy packaging solution that requires no messy inks or printers, and can be designed in the same software as the device itself. We’ve covered this area before, talking about what it takes to go from a home project to a saleable kit. If you’re in the game, you might find [Wrickert]’s hack to be just the ticket!

Hinge Brings New Meaning To Flexible PCB

June 26, 2020 by Al Williams 9 Comments

It is not a secret that flexible PC boards can bend. But despite the substrate’s flexibility, you can’t really fold them completely over. That bothered [Carl] so he developed a hinge design so that he can fold a board completely in half. You can watch a video showing an example, FlexBox, below.

Normal boards can fold over, but the copper traces can’t tolerate a very tight bend radius. [Carl’s] trick is to make the folding part have no traces at all. Only a small bridge carries traces between the two halves and it is allowed to bend almost like an interconnecting cable.

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