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Circuit Board Etching


cjackson

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Anyone know of any companies in the Columbus area that does ciruit board etching from breadboarded circuits? I know OSU Physics department has a chemical etcher, but I don't know if they will etch comercially. I'm working on a Senior project for school and we have about 4 circuits breadboarded and were looking to get them all etched onto one board. If you know, then please forward the info to me. Thanks in advance.
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IIRC you can buy kits to chemically etch your own stuff.

 

The place I used to work did their own proto boards, but they had their own chemical and mechanical etchers. They never used anyone outside. We don't do that type of work where I am now, nor have I ever used anywhere in the past.

 

I'm sure there is somewhere. I think cost might be an issue unless they feel like being charitable since it's for school.

 

I'll ask my dad tonight if he knows anywhere.

 

Just wondering, what's the deal with a 'senior' design and you are 20? Take a few years off in high school. :p

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Just wondering, what's the deal with a 'senior' design and you are 20? Take a few years off in high school. :p

 

I'm in his Senior project group. We go to DeVry, we have trimesters, therefore we graduate about a year earlier than other bachelor programs at typical colleges. The Senior project is something all students must do in their 8th (of 9) semester.

 

Anyways, on with the topic!

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if you find etching to be too expensive you may want to look into wire wrap. We use that for a board at work that performs several functions for a gauge to measure thickness of steel. It has about 10 different circuits on it with a few hundred connections.

 

Heres an example I found of what wire wrap looks like:

 

http://www.linuxfocus.org/common/images/article300/top.jpg

 

http://www.linuxfocus.org/common/images/article300/wrap.jpg

 

Its very easy to fix mistakes and modify!

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I thought the devry in cbus had a etcher....I seem to recall it being new when I went there. I graduated EET from that campus in 00.

 

 

Might want to ask the lab guys I'm almost positive they had one.

 

I am one of the lab guys and it doesn't work so good. It's basically like a router that cuts the lines in the board. People have problems with it. Sometimes they have to flash the boards with high voltage to burn out small traces that shouldn't be where they are. Just overall not worth the time to use it. Maybe one night when I'm super bored I'll dig it out and play with it.

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We're familiar with wire wrap, we had to wire wrap an entire working clock. What a pain. That may be a good idea though.

 

Fuck wire wrapping in its ass. I wrapped that damn clock twice because a couple wires got crossed in the spaghetti mess of shit. The clock is actually a single board computer complete with ROM, RAM, MICRO, onboard clock, lcd screen, etc. It's called a clock because that's what the code we had did for the OS, it kept track of time. Lots of work for something that's not worth it.

 

Edit: I'll leave the stuff breadboarded before I start wire wrapping, no matter how much better the connections are.

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