hey everyone I've
been working on this
idea of creating printed circuits with
my vacuum deposition chamber and this
weekend I finally finished in making the
first successful active circuit so you
can see it here it's a two LED flasher
and for some reason after I took it out
of the curing oven to cure the epoxy the
flash rate is really fast now I'm not
sure if you can see that with the camera
frame rate but as you can see before I
put it in the oven it was flashing it
sort of a more noticeable rate here so
let me tell you how I did it I started
with a vinyl cutter and this is a pretty
interesting tool that has all kinds of
different uses but it's mostly sold to
craftspeople to cut out paper and other
you know scrapbooking type materials but
in my case I exported an image from a
PCB layout tool called Eagle and
imported the image into the vinyl cutter
software and then cut out some black
vinyl in the shape of a file pattern for
a circuit board I spent quite a bit of
time trying to get a vector image format
to go from Eagle into the vinyl cutter
software but despite hours of trying it
never really worked and so the easiest
thing I found is just to export a
high-resolution image PNG file and use
that as the transfer medium and then in
the vinyl cutter software just trace
that image out and that seems to work
fine for I think that would be fine even
down to 400 micron TIFF stuff I then
removed the unwanted pieces from the cut
final just using a pair of tweezers and
then the real magic of this whole vinyl
cutting process is the use of the
transfer paper or the transfer sticker
so the transfer paper has a very low
tack adhesive on it that lets me pull
off the cut vinyl and keep it all in
registration with itself and then to
deposit it on to a substrate and in this
case I'm going to be using some clear
transparency sheets laser printer
transparency sheets I then double stick
the transparency sheet onto an aluminum
backing plate and the point of this is
just to keep it flat and also to keep it
from overheating when I put it in the
vacuum chain
I'm going to be exposing this to some
very high intensity radiant heat and if
there were no backing plate the plastic
would get very hot and warp the vacuum
chamber is set up so that the thing that
I want to coat with metal is at the top
of the chamber facing down and the metal
that I'm going to evaporate is at the
bottom of the chamber facing up and so
when I turn the power on after pulling a
vacuum in the chamber I can evaporate
the metal in this case aluminium and the
evaporated aluminum travels upward and
deposits on to the substrate which is
the clear plastic transparency in this
case I've also got my crystal thickness
monitor system working thanks to the
help of a very generous viewer and I can
monitor the thickness of aluminum as
it's being deposited I've made quite a
few attempts at doing this before and
you can see some of the different
combinations of stuff that I have here
so we've got aluminum on paper aluminum
on ABS plastic this was aluminum on
printer transparency but this is one
that I did without the the metal backing
plate and what happened is is it just
overheated the vinyl and basically just
burned the vinyl right into the
transparency I couldn't even peel it off
so then I figured out to use the backing
plate and made this one and this is the
circuit from today in aluminum I can
also do aluminum on glass which looks
nice but the adhesion of the aluminum
onto the glass is not very good this was
a contaminated sample that was supposed
to be aluminum that ended up being
something else and what I settled on was
actually doing a copper so copper on
glass works pretty well this one I was
even able to solder to if I was really
careful if I was very very quick with
the iron I could actually solder to the
copper that was deposited onto the glass
here I've also deposited copper on to
transparency and this is what I used
today so what ended up working for me
was the copper on the clear transparency
the aluminum I was having too much of a
trouble with getting a low enough
resistance so the thickness of aluminum
here is probably in the 1 to 300
nanometer range and that's very very
thin in fact it's so thin that the
resistance of the layer is high enough
to be a problem even in even in a
circuit like this so after the metal has
been deposited I take the sample out of
the chamber and then peel off the vinyl
leaving just the traces where I want
them on the substrate
these printer transparencies are not
able to withstand soldering temperatures
so I'm going to use a conductive epoxy
glue to hold down the components onto
them onto the printed circuit and
fortunately enough all of this ended up
working out just fine and I had a
working circuit at the end of the day so
you might be thinking well this isn't
actually all that great because
commercially we can do this on Kapton
and it's even able to be refloat and
it's thinner and the copper layer is
thicker and it can be you know
chemically etched and all that however
what I'm really interested in doing here
is making the inputs and outputs of the
circuit integrated into the stuff that
I'm depositing with the vacuum chamber
so instead of gluing down surface mount
components what I really want to do is
make thin film transistors and ol Ed's
in the plastic so the entire circuit is
actually integrated or at least
deposited onto the substrate then you
can actually have some really
interesting stuff going on that cuts
down the assembly time and also
hopefully will make it flexible so just
for kicks since we're a camera Network
you know filming this now I wanted to
flex this and figure out just how
flexible it actually is so I'm going to
flex it to breakage here if I can and it
looks like what happens is if I flex it
the glue breaks and then it'll actually
reconnect if I flex it the other way so
it's really not that flexible it would
be nice to make a clear flexible sort of
sticker circuit that was there we just
lost a component there so it's
definitely coming apart and my goal here
is to have a much more flexible durable
circuit okay well let me know if you
have any suggestions of what I should
build next or substrate idea
or anything like that okay see you next best way to earn money from home, make instant money online absolutely free, trusted online money making sites, online income site, best online earning, money online, earn money from home, earn dollars online, earn money online, earn money online 2019, earn money online by typing pages, earn money online daily, online work at home and earn money, online earning, earn money online free, online money earning sites, earn real money online, e commerce ideas to make money, easiest way to earn money online, best way to earn money online, make money from home, make money online free, money making sites, earn from home, real ways to make money from home, online income ideas, make real money online, top online earning websites, earn money online fast, top 10 money earning websites, earn money without investment, earn money online for students, best sites to earn money, make money online 2019, earn easy money online, earn money online instantly, real money earning sites, make money from home online, make money online fast, earn dollar online free, online earning ways, best online money earning, earn money online with surejob, make money online, online money making sites, best sites to make money online, earn money online paypal, online earn money by typing, best survey sites, ways to earn money online, ways to earn money from home, make money online without investment, make money online surveys,
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