Interesting Nixie counter at auction

[Terry S]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-Nixie-Tube-Counter/174617954314?hash=item28a80a880a:g:AHEAAOSwmm1f-c7t

As a former career PCB designer -- I'm admiring the hand taped-out boards in this counter. They look amazing, so consistent and artful. I can tell they all bear the same signature, the same designer. Beautiful designs.

I hope someone here grabs this. Neat piece.

[Richard Scales]

I can remember laying out PCB designs using black tape and transfers at 2x or 3x size on a light box back around 79-81 - those were the days - if only modern PCB routing software could achieve something similar, apply the 'human touch' perhaps!

 - Richard

[Dekatron42]

A few PCB routing softwares are getting back curved traces, I have seen examples from KiCAD and Designspark but haven't tested them out myself but I sure will do when and if they are available!

/Martin

[Ian Vine]

I made a few boards using tape a loong way back. I never considered getting arty. Loving the wavey traces on that board

Ian

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[newxito]

I remember making an amplifier board using a felt pen in the early seventies. 

[alb.001 alb.001]

Back in the 1970's when the electronics magazines provided full and half sizes photos of PCB's for the articles, I developed my own way of laying out PCB's.  I photocopied the printed PCB full size, taped it onto the copper side of a single or double sided PB  board, and used a Dremel with fine carbide drill bits to drill all the holes required. 

Then I got a glass tube 3-4 inches long and slightly less than 1/4 inch diameter which I heated up in the middle with a blowtorch and when the glass was soft I would stretch it out to form a jet in between the two thicker sections and snapped it off leaving the glass tube with a 2-3 inch very slim section.  I then poured a few drops of ladies nail polish into the tube and attached a rubber hose to the wider end of the glass tube.  I prepared the board by removing the paper and sanding the copper side smooth and dust free. I then painted on all the traces using my home-made resist pen while gently blowing into the rubber hose.  The whole process worked very well and I got to be good enough to run a line between the 0.1 inch IC pads.

 After a long and careful comparison of my layout with that in the magazine - it was easy to correct any errors with a fine blade scraper,  I etched the board using ammonium persulfate solution and a peristaltic pump to spray the etchant onto the board while it was in a plastic bowl.  I have made boards up to 10 inches square with hundreds of holes this way. I even did some double sided boards this way.  Modern boards with traces a fraction of a millimeter apart are out of reach for such hand-work.

Pharma Phil 

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[Ⓙⓞⓗⓝ Ⓢⓜⓞⓤⓣ]

I worked in a printed circuit factory at one time, as a silk-screen printer. At times I'd do other jobs, like cutting the blanks, using the presses, drilling boards, flow-soldering. My work bench was right next to an open cyanide tank used for gold plating edge connectors. A hideous woman with green teeth did the electro-plating. If it was her turn to make the tea, I politely declined a cup.

The boss upstairs was an EE. He designed and fabricated a lot of kit for the UK Post Office. It got known I could draw a bit (I'd studied as an architect) so I got to do many crêpe tape and stick-on pad layouts for the boss, who had yellow teeth - a slight improvement on the lady downstairs.

John S

[Ian Vine]

@John S Love the bit about the green teeth tea lady ..

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[Mac Doktor]

On Jan 31, 2021, at 9:18 AM, newxito <axt...@gmail.com> wrote:

I remember making an amplifier board using a felt pen in the early seventies. 

In the early Nineties I laid out PC boards with Illustrator. There were no user-definable style sheets. To change the width of a trace I had to bring up a dialog box that filled the entire screen on a Mac Plus and took over two seconds to draw on the screen. Then I had to mouse around to what I wanted to change, clicking on boxes, typing in numbers, clicking "OK". This got old very quickly. 

I finally got a macro program and used it to do all of the mousing for me. LUXURY.

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... beams...in the dark in the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time...like tears in the rain." — Roy Batty, Blade Runner

[Mac Doktor]

On Jan 31, 2021, at 5:51 PM, Mac Doktor <themac...@gmail.com> wrote:

I finally got a macro program and used it to do all of the mousing for me. LUXURY.

I hit send too soon. 

At the time I was working for a local printer. My workflow was to draw the board at 200%, print it out on their 300DPI laser printer, and shoot a negative at 50% with their enormous old camera. This increased the resolution to 600DPI and smoothed out the edges of angled traces. Analog anti-aliasing. 

I used the negative to expose pre-sensitized blank boards and etch them. My etching tank was a deep Pyrex® (borosilicate glass) baking dish with a long aquarium aerator "bar" in the bottom. This was connected to an air pump with a bleeder valve that I used to vary the pressure and therefore the amount of bubbling. This in turn agitated the board so strongly and evenly that a perfect etch (with used ferric chloride) only took a few minutes—unattended.

I set up my Unimat as a miniature drill press, clamped the board on the milling table, and used the precision feed-screws to drill perfectly spaced and aligned holes.

Those were the days.

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

https://www.astarcloseup.com/

“...the book said something astonishing, a very big thought. The stars, it said, were suns but very far away. The Sun was a star but close up.”—Carl Sagan, "The Backbone Of Night", Cosmos, 1980

[Adrian Godwin]

This (free) software takes PCB artworks created in inkscape and generates manufacturing files.

https://github.com/boldport/pcbmode

Some examples here :

https://github.com/boldport/circuit-board-photos

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[Nick Andrews]

Now that is pretty cool.

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