PCB prototyping idea

[N_Cook]

I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated
www.cricut.com
I got the demonstrator to try it out on 0.05mm thick copper foil. It
worked very well on parallel lines 0.3mm spacing and letters where the
vertical body of letters wer of qwerty were 2mm high and extra
curveyness of the "fun" script cut out and came through perfectly well.
It would have gone smaller I'm sure but that was the minimum she could
go to on her tablet and typeface.
She was so impressed she emailed a pic the engineering department of
that company.
Machine is roller feed of flat sheet. Requires firm , more than stick-it
note, bonding of the foil to a backing or the foil will tear. The cutter
was not new, a few months of about 22 hours a day use, often left
running overnight for multiple outputs, like 3D printer operation.

[N_Cook]

On 26/05/2016 16:11, rickman wrote:

> On 5/26/2016 9:47 AM, N_Cook wrote:
>> I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated
>> www.cricut.com
>> I got the demonstrator to try it out on 0.05mm thick copper foil. It
>> worked very well on parallel lines 0.3mm spacing and letters where the
>> vertical body of letters wer of qwerty were 2mm high and extra
>> curveyness of the "fun" script cut out and came through perfectly well.

>> She was so impressed she emailed a pic the engineering department of
>> that company.
>> Machine is roller feed of flat sheet. Requires firm , more than stick-it
>> note, bonding of the foil to a backing or the foil will tear. The cutter
>> was not new, a few months of about 22 hours a day use, often left
>> running overnight for multiple outputs, like 3D printer operation.
>

> How thin could it cut a line? Instead of 0.3 mm, ask her to try making
> 0.15 lines separated by 0.15 spaces. If it does that it would be useful
> for many types of prototypes. At 0.3 mm it's only good for relatively
> crude work on PCBs.
>

The penetrating score lines must be about .1mm wide,going by eye,
remember this was not a new cutter

[N_Cook]

On 26/05/2016 20:16, Jon Elson wrote:
> N_Cook wrote:
>
>> I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated
>> www.cricut.com
>> I got the demonstrator to try it out on 0.05mm thick copper foil. It
>> worked very well on parallel lines 0.3mm spacing and letters where the
>> vertical body of letters wer of qwerty were 2mm high and extra
>> curveyness of the "fun" script cut out and came through perfectly well.
>> She was so impressed she emailed a pic the engineering department of
>> that company.
>> Machine is roller feed of flat sheet. Requires firm , more than stick-it
>> note, bonding of the foil to a backing or the foil will tear. The cutter
>> was not new, a few months of about 22 hours a day use, often left
>> running overnight for multiple outputs, like 3D printer operation.

> Hmmm, very interesting. Can you send me a picture of that test, too?
>
> A guy I'm working with is doing wearable LED clothing. We made some
> prototypes with Rogers flexible PCB material, that is super expensive. It
> looks like this machine might be able to use some cheap laminated material,
> like they use for metallic labels. You just need to get the stuff made up
> with copper foil instead of aluminum. (Cricut seems to like stainless
> foil.)
>
> Where did you get the copper foil? Was this just bare copper foil, or was
> the foil attached to some plastic backing? That's what I'd want, of course,
> to make a flexible PCB. Or, does Cricut supply the backing as a standard
> consumable?
>
> Thanks for the info, looks VERY interesting.
>
> One other area, can you feed it arbitrary drawings? How about Gerber files?
> (Yeah, I know, I'm asking a lot!!)
>
> Jon
>

The craft shop was next to a retail nursery supermarket, so I bought a
roll of copper slug tape, 30mm wide x.05mm ( apparently better than beer
or eggshells to deter slugs, think touching metal foil to a sensitive
tooth). I assume wider copper foil is available from elsewhere.
She said you could load any data , not necesssary to use their
propretary stuff

[N_Cook]

On 26/05/2016 20:37, Jim Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2016 14:16:30 -0500, Jon Elson <jme...@wustl.edu>

> Can you feed it a ordinary PCB blank?
>
> I have a Stika "printer" which cuts stick-on tape that I've used
> successfully to mask sand-blasting glass with fairly intricate
> patterns.
>
> I've been tempted to try that as an FeCl3 etch mask.
>
> ...Jim Thompson
>

She had examples of neatly cut leather about 3mm thick, so presumable
with correct offset for depth of cut , would work on this m/c

[Jon Elson]

N_Cook wrote:


>>
>
> The craft shop was next to a retail nursery supermarket, so I bought a
> roll of copper slug tape, 30mm wide x.05mm ( apparently better than beer
> or eggshells to deter slugs, think touching metal foil to a sensitive
> tooth). I assume wider copper foil is available from elsewhere.
> She said you could load any data , not necesssary to use their
> propretary stuff

Ah, so you stuck your own copper to the self-stick base material for the
machine, and then cut it! Wow, sounds very simple, and avoids paying Rogers
about $1 per square inch!

OK, I will have to tell my contact about this, it looks like a real solution
to a problem. Now, one little detail is how well the copper foil will stick
to the base material after a bunch of flexing, etc. if the copper starts to
come loose, combine that with Lithium 18650 batteries and we could have a
nice fire!

Jon

[rickman]

What is an m/c?

--

Rick C

[MJC]

> On 2016-05-26 04:06 rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is an m/c?

It's a robot Master of Ceremonies, otherwise known as a Machine.

Mike.

[Les Cargill]

Jon Elson wrote:
> N_Cook wrote:
>
>> I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated
>> www.cricut.com

> Hmmm, well, the web site glosses over a bunch of stuff. First, NO MENTION
> whatsoever about HOW you get an image into the thing.


"Cricut Explore Air is the ultimate electronic cutting machine for DIY
projects and crafts with embedded Bluetooth® for wireless cutting. "

https://shop.cricut.com/en_us/machines/cricut-explore-air.html

The non-Air one makes no mention of how it is used. My guess is USB
because USB is roughly wired Bluetooth.

> I'm guessing it has a
> USB port, but then you'd have to have some software on your computer or
> tablet/phone/whatever. There's a video where they mention something about
> uploading your image to the web. This would be a deal killer right there,
> we don't want to let our IP be seen by anybody.
>
> Also, especially if a P&P machine would be used, the cricut piece would have
> to dimensionally calibrated, at least. If you are uploading "pretty
> pictures" to the thing, what is the calibration? (I guess you'd just have
> to measure it.)
>
> So, Mr. Cook, do you have any idea how you load data to it? Does the thing
> just look like a printer or something?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jon
>

--
Les Cargill

[Robert Roland]

On Fri, 27 May 2016 17:11:59 -0500, Jon Elson <jme...@wustl.edu>
wrote:

>Does the thing
>just look like a printer or something?

A generalized term for this type of machine is a CSR, a Computerized
Signmaking Robot. A common use for them is to cut vinyl film to make
signs that can be stuck on cars, windows or anywhere else you like.

I once wrote a converter to convert HPGL to a CSR's propriety
language. Many machines accept HPGL directly. To the computer, they
will then look like a plotter. That means you must feed it vector
graphics. Bitmaps will need to go through a process called tracing
before you can output them to the cutter.

If I remember right, the knives were quite expensive.

If I were to buy a CSR, I would find out if it accepts a standard
language. If it does not, it will only work with the vendor's own
software, which may not suit your needs. I have seen software that had
its own proprietary format for fonts. You could not use TTF, and the
font packages were, of course, blindingly expensive.
--
RoRo

[N_Cook]

On 27/05/2016 23:11, Jon Elson wrote:
> N_Cook wrote:
>
>> I was in a craft shop today and one of these was being demonstrated
>> www.cricut.com
> Hmmm, well, the web site glosses over a bunch of stuff. First, NO MENTION

> whatsoever about HOW you get an image into the thing. I'm guessing it has a

> USB port, but then you'd have to have some software on your computer or
> tablet/phone/whatever. There's a video where they mention something about
> uploading your image to the web. This would be a deal killer right there,
> we don't want to let our IP be seen by anybody.
>
> Also, especially if a P&P machine would be used, the cricut piece would have
> to dimensionally calibrated, at least. If you are uploading "pretty
> pictures" to the thing, what is the calibration? (I guess you'd just have
> to measure it.)
>

> So, Mr. Cook, do you have any idea how you load data to it? Does the thing

> just look like a printer or something?
>

> Thanks,
>
> Jon
>

She was transferring data composed on her ordinary tablet, via wifi, to
the cutter. She said the company's interface s/w is freely available to
download off their www and use your own typefaces and so I presume other
graphical input, but needs checking on that.
I should say she was the UK rep for these things and had been using them
personally for at least a year, so not a numpty
Download their s/w and try it.
She was happy to try thin copper foil as she had cut aluminium IIRC
kitchen foil previously. But 2oz copper, unknown, as also full cut of
3mm is possible,eg the leather samples I don't know about selective
shallow depth of cut over 2or 3mm .
With my slug foil, it came on siliconised? backing tape for easy peel,
feeding as is with backing to the cutter, it tore off the backing.
Unpeeling the foil, with its gummy backing intact, and sticking to the
usual feed-in sheet, worked fine, selecting "vinyl" cut depth option.
Limited to 1 x 2 foot area of cutting, total sheet area
So for the "dress-maker" in this thread, find bare foil, coat with
something to strongish bond to some flexible heat tolerant sheet and
feed into the cutter, and needle off surplus material