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A UV PCB/EPROM Exposure box made from an old flatbed scanner.


Artesia

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heres a little project i made from a defunct flatbed scanner & 88 uv leds from the 'bay.

uvsr.jpg

its contructed from 88 uv leds mounted in a square grid of holes in a piece of plastic, with a resistor driving each. setup for 12v.

the light is diffused by a piece of mottled effect glass (smooth side out) used for decorative door panes & the tops of the leds have been flattened by cutting the end off them with a 'dremmel' mini sawblade disc. the tops of the leds where then smoothed again by adding a dab of superglue ontop of each.

a 555 timer with variable resistor timer adjust will be added for setting exposure time.

dispersion of light seems very good, and a hackier arrangement similar to this has been seen working by a friend; will confirm how well this works soon.

other users may find this a fun way to get more life from a broken scanner, so posting the concept here for further inspiration :)

Note:

use white leds, flat the tops as before & just keep the original glass (or use the finer sandblast effect diffused glass) if you are partial to tracing images for gfx art purposes ;) :)

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very nice Artesia. I never tried to use UV exposure method to make an homemade PCB. In this light side way of etching boards Just tried photo-emulsion via silkscreen, I already used halogen lamp and a reflector to reveal layouts to the copper.

As I'm a schizophrenic junk collector, I already has some broken cannibalized scanners here. This project definitely leads them for another destiny than use their cases to put some mb project or whatever.

Thanks to show it.

KB

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  • 7 months later...

design changed slightly, reverted back to the old glass ..diffusion turned out to be too close to the boards, makingf exposure blotchy ! ..actually diffuses perefectly in this arrangement anyways.

found staples OHP laser transparency film [sl5041] to work perfectly in making pcbs. dont need to use the expensive stuff nessursarily.

depending on your milage with the uv led brightness & the type/age of the uv senstized boards, your timings will vary. i needed 15 mins or so per a side, with some ooold stock adquired from a chap who used to produce alot of his own amplifier boards in house.

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nice project artesia!

i have an old scanner here , so i may as well give that a go! i did find a pdf project on the elektor site i grabbed using one of the old plastic tool trays. but this looks much better.

i will try this next week , just grabbing some leds off ebay now and some other bits.

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  • 10 months later...

Another website can't remember wich, led me to belive that UV LEDs couldn't do the job very well because of wavelength specs, so I threw mine in a drawer and forgot about them until now. If this really works I will make a similar design too. I have never tried making PCBs other than the old diy way with a permanent marker and dipping it in ferric chloride.

Any links to instructions on how to use this method from printing the layout to etching the PCB would be appreciated if someone knows of such.

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