Making the PCB at home

This is just a brief description of how you can make your own single / double sided PCBs at home. I'm sure that you can find other, more precise and better tutorials on this topic.

I make my own photo-sensitive boards from raw copper plates (using the Positiv 20 spray), so if you have a board which does have the photo-sensitive layer on it, you can skip few steps here. In that case the photo-sensitive layer removing process might be different.

1. Measure and cut out the needed part from the raw copper plate.

2. Clean the surface of the plate using a very soft sandpaper. Do not touch the already cleaned parts as they will 'rust' very quickly.

3. Spray a thin layer of Positiv 20 spray on the copper plate.

This is how it should look like right after spraying. If you leave the plate to dry, the photo-sensitive layer will become more continuous.

Drying will take 24 hours in dark at ambient temperature, or 30 minutes at 70 Celsius degrees.

4. Attach the film to the photo-sensitive copper plate. If you are making double sided PCB, then you should bind together both films (for bottom and upper side) together and then bind them to the plate (so that the film doesn't change position if you turn over the plate). 

5. Put the plate with film under the UV lamp for 10 minutes. (This time depends on the power of lamp, the type and quality of photo-sensitive layer, on the quality and light resistance of the film).

6. Put the plate in the NaOH lotion (10 g/l sodium hydroxide in water) at ambient temperature for approximately 60 seconds.

When the photo-sensitive layer disappears in NaOH, it looks like this.

7. Clean the plate under water.

8. Put the plate in HCl and H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) for couple of minutes.

You should take the plate out of the lotion if all the unwanted copper goes away and the board looks like this.

9. Cut off the unwanted parts of the plate.

10. Process the edges with sandpaper.

You should get something like this.

11. Drill holes where needed. Use a better drill than mine :)

And the PCB after drilling should look like this.

12. Take down the photo-sensitive layer using an old tooth-brush and acetone. You can use solvents (ester, ketone) or aqueous alkalines instead of acetone.

You should get a clean plate like this one.

13. If you are making a double sided PCB, you should connect one side with the other using a thin wire where needed (as the metalic vias can't be easily done at home).

The plate with wires instead of metalic vias will look like this.

 

If you got that PCB done, you can solder the power supply part of that device and see if it works (if there are no short cuts, if the voltage is correct, ...).

If everything is OK, solder the rest of the parts and you're done.