One of the major hurdles when making printed circuit boards at home is to solve how to transfer the PCB design to a copper clad board so that the extra copper can then be etched away. You can print transparencies with your printer and you can get inexpensive photosensitive boards but you still need some source of ultraviolet light for transferring the design to the board. I found some inexpensive 5mm UV leds on eBay and decided to give this a try. Other people had reported success so I was confident that this would work. Of course this is a chicken-or-the-egg type of problem. You need to be able to expose one PCB in order to make a device that you can use to expose PCB’s. Luckily I had access to the tools required. You could also easily construct this on veroboard.

I had an old A4/letter size scanner that was no longer producing sharp scans. The top part with the bed and lid looked just perfect Continue reading UV led pcb exposure box →