pcb printing

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

Not everything is life is driven by the almight dollar, or the currency of
your choice

Hmm - the less discretionary money you have, the more power to your Boss ...
the Bank, the bastards at the Tax Office and whatever other parasites
insinuates themselves upon your limited hours of life once they smell
weakness - you don't have to be a billionaire but having little debt is
certainly one way of keeping out of slavery.

Thus, to me, spending money only on things I enjoy is a priority.

Some of us like to do things like this for fun, control, education, and
often
it is a lot faster than sending things out to someone else to deal with.

Well, I like getting the results more than the pcb-making part - which to me
is messy, tedious and boring work. Home-brew boards tend to be ugly too,
Mine are anyway ;-)

I would rather be doing something else entirely.

Not every photographer uses a digital camera and the corner drugstore for
everything. Many of us still enjoy the darkroom processes and the
fulfilment
of doing it exactly the way we want.

My point ...

I use alternative energy to power my home, even tho its certainly not
cheaper
than the local power company.

What system do you have?

You see: For me, the purpose of using alternatives would be to reduce my
immediate dependency of a bunch of Islamist Nazies and to deposit my power
bill in a region of the world that appreciate my existence. It actually
looks like a combined solar/furnace system will even cut my total heating
bill, thus increasing my total freedom.

Lighten up and realize that some people just enjoy doing the work for the
sake
of the work.

I'm light all over ;-)

Work is what I *have to do*. I wish to replace 'work' with *what I choose to
do*. I choose not to make pcb's because I cannot met my own standards and go
bicycling instead.

Money is not everything, although its seems to be getting
there......

Money, like Work is a means to an end.

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

Life is too short, but, apparently long enough to wait 1-3 weeks for PCBS.

While *you* might prefer to watch the letter box ... *I* would probably take
a bicycle trip, go to the movies, do some work on the house or maybe even a
shopping expedition to Germany ;-)

I can and have made PCBs in 1 hour. The most expensive parts of the setup
were a UV light box and a high speed drill + stand both of which have
other
uses.

Been there before - glad that I do not have to anymore.

 

[Mark Zenier]

Pretty soon I plan to get a bunch of equipment to make PCBs using
photoresist & laser printed transparencies etc.

I have the laser printer already, and I did a test to check its
stretching. I got a graphics prog to draw a square of 15cm or so, and
measured each side.

The horizontal side turned out pretty much exact, but the vertical was
151mm or so.

Can I work with this? will vertical stretching of the board layout by 7%
or so cause trouble for me? Or should I look into fixing this printer, or
getting a new one?

Can anyone recommend a (not too expensive) printer? Preferrably one
that's linux-friendly

Lastly, does anyone have a service manual for a canon LBP-800?

Check the docs for the printer spooler that you use or the docs and
source for the printer driver. (The CUPS spooler has scale factors
in the command line print programs, but only to a 1 % resolution).
If the driver for that printer uses Ghostscript for the Postscript/PDF
to raster/bitmap conversion (like they do for HP printers), you could
dig in and tweek the driver script to set the printer resolution or
adjust a scale factor for the one dimension.

Or use ImageMagick or the GIMP to scale the image.

Mark Zenier [email protected] Washington State resident

 

[YD]

Pretty soon I plan to get a bunch of equipment to make PCBs using
photoresist & laser printed transparencies etc.

I have the laser printer already, and I did a test to check its
stretching. I got a graphics prog to draw a square of 15cm or so, and
measured each side.

The horizontal side turned out pretty much exact, but the vertical was
151mm or so.

Can I work with this? will vertical stretching of the board layout by 7%
or so cause trouble for me? Or should I look into fixing this printer, or
getting a new one?

As mentioned by others, that's 0.7%. Unless you use very large parts
(across the board) with very exact spacing it's nothing to worry
about. Using a 0.8 or 0.7 mm drill gives enough slop to push most
parts in without too much force. My process tends to be messier and
still been able to use up to 40 pin DIPs.

- YD.