Week 08: Electronics Production

Group Assignment

• Characterize the design rules for your in-house PCB production process: document the settings for your machine.
• Document the workflow for sending a PCB to a boardhouse
• Document your work to the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned

Individual Assignment

Make and test a microcontroller development board that you designed

Different PCB board production technics - LIG Laser into Graphine - I mentioned this idea in week06. I thought I could wood burn a circut, but wasn't sure the result would be as conductive as pure carbon graphite because the burning would take place in an oxygen rich environment. I wondered if I could fill the machine with an inert gas that wouldn't burn. Or house the a plasma beam in glass filled with CO2. The index of refraction of air will differ from that of Carbon Dioxide, CO2, or other gasses. I wonder how much that would effect the beam of the laser? This article on charcoal-making from Virginia Tec explains the process of creating charcoal, a pure carbon compound, through the process of pyrolysis in which an organic material such as wood is heated to temeratures greater then 400 degrees farenheight in an oxygen-starved environment. Since wood burns at 451degrees farenheight (thank you Ray Bradbury for never letting me forget that) it is possible to create charcoal without burning it. - what temperatures do the lasers heat the wood to? Since the edges often flame up, I assume the temperature is greater then 451 degrees F. So laser engraving a circuit board will not produce high quality charwood, and therefore have lackluster preformance as a circuit board.