Homebrew PCBs

Hi,

How much money are you willing to spend?  The opposite of your 
suggestion is already available (about $10K for a starter system).

It's a laser "printer" that has enough power to burn wood.  It's used 
to engrave things (like pens).  If you coated copper clad with an etch 
resist, you could use the "printer" to burn away the areas you don't 
want.

I thought about contacting them to find out if they had a laser that 
was powerful enough to burn the copper and holes.  But, that's more 
money than I could spend anyway...

Another option is a flat bed plotter with an appropiate ink for an 
etch resist.  When I worked at HP Labs in the late 70's, someone 
developed a flat bed plotter where the pen moved in on axis and the 
paper moved in another.  The ink came from a bottle with appropriate 
plumbing.  This plotter would have sold for hundreds of dollars.

If you had 10's of thousands, you could buy a huge flat bed plotter 
(like the Xynetics that was in use in the early 80's).  That plotter 
could be fit with cutting blades and the etch resist that would have 
been used in those days would have been "Ruby tape".  I've used that 
tape in various widths to create PCB's back in the 70's.  Back in 
those days there was no toner transfer because inexpensive, solid 
state lasers hadn't been invented/commercialized...  Back then, it 
took over 100mA to get a laser diode to lase and you had to decrease 
current when turning it off if you didn't want to destroy the diode.  
At low currents, they were just like LEDs.  Power output was irratic, 
so each diode had a beam splitter, detector, and driver to maintain 
constant output power.  My job was to find commercially viable 
applications for the stuff HP Labs was making (laser diodes, optical 
fibers, liquid crystals, SAW resonators, etc).  I was a technician 
back then, so I did mostly prototyping with minimal design...

Regards,
Dennis

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@...m, "jam5411" <mardock@...> wrote:
>
> I read with much interest all the work that is going into the TT
> method of creating artwork on copper. Has anyone experimented with
> modifications to a Laser Printer to directly apply the artwork to the
> copper? Seems this would solve a lot of the issues, if it were
> possible. I remember a few years back I had a Laserjet 4L. It had a
> straight through path and would accept some pretty thick card stock 
as
> I recall. Now I wish I had not thrown it out in the late last 
century...
>