THE MAGIC OF INPUT DEVICES

This week we were tasked with making some input devices. I had wanted to try out making circuit on the vinyl cutter for quite some time now, so this provided the perfect opportunity!

I initially tried to cut out the hello microphone board listed on our Input Devices class page.

Here is the png that I used to generate the toolpath using the fab module:

And here is the result on the vinyl cutter:

You can see that quite a few traces are missing. I tried a few different times in order to get the pressure and speed settings to the best possible combination, but since the traces were not all there I ended up cutting a different circuit.

Some things that I learned from using the fab modules on our vinyl cutter:

• Changing the force and speed settings in the fab module does actually change the settings on the vinyl cutter. We were unsure if we had to change them ourselves by hand, but the tests were done at 5 different settings and there was a difference each time.
• The settings that worked best for my circuit were using a speed of 2.5 cm/s and a force of 70g.

I ended up cutting the hello load board:

The pressure settings were decent, but I still had to do a lot of cutting by hand with a razor blade. I transferred the circuit to a scrap piece of acrylic and got to work trying to salvage the circuit.

After a painstaking process, I got to this point:

I started soldering...

And eventually got the whole thing stuffed.

I took the advice offered in this tutorial on using a vinyl cutter to make circuits, namely to apply a little extra hear to the traces in order to sink them a bit into the acrylic, but found that it did not help. I ended up using hot glue to fix down the headers.

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Published on   April 2nd, 2013