Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

I am not an expert in PCB production and despite that I am interested
in circuit layout and design. About a year ago, not really knowing
anything I delved into this topic and attempted to make my own PCB
board.

At the time I had an Epson Stylus 600 (I now had the 825 model) and I
bought some Ink Jet transparency paper. I also built my own 2 sided
UV exposure frame for about 200 bucks. No vacuum, just a piece of
glass and an area sectioned off with double sided window foam to put
the tranparencies and the PCB to expose. I had 4 UV lights on each
side to expose the board.

I can honestly say that my first attempt (EVER) was a smashing
success. My first design was a two layer 8 bit I/O IDE card with
about 7 IC chips on it. I showed a hardware engineer freind of mine
the results and he was impressed after I gave him the lowdown on how I
did it. I am thinking the spec was at 7 mils, but please dont quote
me on that, like I said I am no expert. There is a lot more to tell
about the process but with the equipment I had available it took me
about 1.5 hrs to produce the board including drilling 100 holes. No
thru-plating or silkscreening at this point.

You may not be able to produce extremely tight tolerances with this
method but I can absolutely attest to the quality of a simple PCB, it
looks pretty professional. If you are going to do something complex
you are probably going to send it out to a board house anyway. I
think for the average simple board, this method is very cheap and easy.