At work back in the 80's I exposed many, many pcb's with a lightbox etc........the quality you have achieved here surpasses by an order of magnitude........and amazing to think you have negated the need to print a mask. Great work!

that is fantastic, I make a lot of PCB with the etching method. nice job.

Great build! Half the fun is in the fine tuning.

Nice and simple. Good project.

you could also try storing the image data as run length encoding (just google it if you've never heard of it) Black and white image compression is basically the perfect use case for run length encoding

You can use only one stepper motor for Y-axis, but with two sided shaft. This will work even better than two motors and cheaper!

Clever idea and looks really cool but I would recommend that you put the cables in a harness to reduce movement, increase lifespan of the wires and would also help to boost machine performance.

Nice work there! I hope to see more from this project soon, i would also like some information on what laser module that you are using as my searches for it has been whitout any luck.

Great project! I guess I'll print it to a project I have ongoing. About your memory limitation, maybe you could try Run-Length encoding? Imagine each line always starts with the laser off, then create a vector { 5, 10, 20 , 30 } that would mean 5 steps with the lase off, 10 steps ON, 20 steps off, 30 steps on... Your preprocessor idea is good too.

you must also adjust the distance between laser and pcb, because laser has a focal length, at a specific distance the spot will be smallest (now it looks big...)

This project would be much improved with a rotating mirror. It'll work much faster and more precise. Also quieter and less energy intensive. I'm glad somebody works on this by the way.

looks great .The rig looks very sturdy . now I know i could use my laser to etch for making boards , I now have even more reason to finish my image to Gcode scanner app. I went with some easy drivers and a Nano and a custom Gcode interpreter . so i can PWM my laser , or bypass the FET and put it full on for cutting cardboard and foam via a relay(true full power) . I created a custom board profile to up the Nano's serial buffer to a real 128. IT can be driven by any terminal , or simple G code sender , or directly by a c++ lib i made for my apps. I added a OLED status screen , but i lowed the updates to OLED to keep speed ok . I plan on finishing an app to load a image into ram on PC , and then scan it out into Gcode at a user set sample rez , and stream it to a USB / com port . ( that's a winter project ) along with trying a modification to GBRL to replace my old custom g code interpreter.

It is very intersting! what kind of laser are you using? i want to draw onto existing pcb-s, and I think it would be great for it. And what is the smallest "dot" you can make?

This is an interesting experiment. I need to build something similar. I can tell you that the photoresist exposes better at 365nm so the 405nm laser is just barely exposing it. The problem is that I haven't been able to find a 365nm laser at an affordable price. You might want to look at Laser Bee's instead of arduinos. The Laser Bee operates at 72 MHz, has 4K RAM ,64K flash and about a jillion internal peripherals. I used one to generate a VGA video signal so there won t be any problem controlling a bunch of stepper motors. In your case, if the jerking problem is caused by interrupts as you suggested, then your interrupts are taking to long and should be re-written.

You may want to mount the system to something other than wood as the wood will grow or shrink from moisture in the air or lack of.

If non of the libraries I use in a project need it, I've come to the point of always disabling the timer0 (this one is running by default giving interrupts for the millis/micros function). That interrupt messes up so many things most of the time (for example sleep mode becomes pretty useless with that on). You can disable the timer with "power_timer0_disable()" (could be that you need to include or for it to be available). In the end I set up all the timer myself anyway, because the Arduino ways are way to limiting.

Great and inspiring project! I thing I,ll make an add on for my CNC machine. What is the wavelength the laser is operating at? Most of the diodes I've found use the end of the spectrum 405nm which is not that efficient. Would be better to get something more like 380? I'd appreciate a link where I can buy a module like yours if it's other than 405 nam ones on eBay. Thanks!

Nice idea for making pcb masks...

Hi Thanks for your video. This is interresting because it is what i'm looking g for. But only for solder masq since actually my laser is allready power enough to burn paint. But i struggle to understand : You suppose the laser light has UVs in it (like any light should have more or less)? Or you use a specific laser diode that produces UVs? Thank's in advance.

I wonder if you could use some kind of metal/foil plate in front of the laser with a pin hole to reduce the size of the dot slightly. Well done, this is a cool project:)

This is a really cool project, and I would like to build it. Can you provide some more details such as where you purchased the components and the Arduino code? Thank you.

I realize that this is an old video, but you could read the file and change the data format internally to be the lengths of the alternating on/offs rather than holding a line of the bitmap. That should be a lot more efficient given the circuits you're producing.

it's awesome good joub :)

Do you think you could double sided boards? how would you go about lining that up accurately?

what wavelength is the laser you are using? do you think 405nm would be close enough to "UV" to expose the photo resist?

very nice ! wow !!! better lens will go you higher prefomance

Why can't you just disable interrupts to get rid of the jitter? You could use a Raspberry PI to process the image and then have the code just send a series of move and laser on/off commands to the arduino (so the real-time bit is done on the arduino). Then you could make the PI look like a print server and be able to just print your board to the laser exposer! Very cool project!

I love the idea... nice looking machine. I guess I would suggest that you just write a program in windows and change your arduino code to be a command interpreter similar to gcode. I can appreciate that you are trying to keep the whole process self contained however. Perhaps you could save the PC generated instructions to the memory card and then execute the instructions from the device itself.

Why not using vectors to move the laser along the tracks and pads ? How ever nice project. May be I put a laser on my 3D printer and try it self. DJ

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you said that you are using BMP files for your circuit images. If that's the case, you might want to look at PBM format instead, which should be more simple and compact and might help alleviate your memory issues a little.

Neat machine! Seems like it would have been simpler to have the board move in the Y-axis and the laser in the X-axis.

Nice. Can you make a tutorial how you made this?

can i use a Stepper Motor 5v 4-phase 5 line 28BYJ - 48 instead of the ones used by you? pls reply.....

nice looking machine. it very much reminds me of a cnc plasma cutting table i designed a few years back wonder if using microstepping would smooth out the motors and make it quieter?

I can't find the related software video, could you post a link please ?

Of course, you'll want to use the binary PBM format instead of ascii.

Can this print QFN sized component pins? What laser did you use?

Hello, where do we find this Laser? What is its power?

What is the laser module that you are using?

do you have the stl's to you engraver plastic parts

How many pixels wide are those horizontal or vertical traces. I am wondering if they are drawn in multiple passes or that is the width of the laser. I am close to using an Elecs 1.5W engraver for this same purpose but the "dot" looked very big when running it at about 100mA. I seam to remember reading somewhere, that running diodes at less than intended affects the divergence , doesn't make any sense to me why that would be. Wondering if I can use a cap/aperture on the laser to control the width. I knew that 1.5W is way too much so I also bought 150ma diodes recently , now I see that even those may be too powerful. I guess time to plug them in and try them. Cheers.

Very nice project, but it's weird that it's that loud. I'm making my own "LDI", but I'm using a laser module with a rotating mirror from a laser printer. So I control just one axis, and the second axis controls me. ;-)

can you not use non coated pcb, and spray with a resist, like acrylic car rattle can spray, then burn it off to etch?

what is the reason for clicking noice?

few years ago i realized it would be cheap to build a cnc these days. Im 99% sure I recall coming across control software that was free and works with common mcus or computer serial linked to mcu and accepts tons of standard cad formats. Great project but dont reinvent the wheel when you dont have to. Also there is an MCU compadible with arduino ide that is known as stm32 it has 0x the ram and more storage than the nano, is 32bit and runs at 75mhz. cost is like 3 bucks on ebay. you will need a $5 stlink flasher to get it running arduino bootloader. How much did this rig cost and where did you find those rails? is 25mw enough where u could skip uv and just go black paint or toner coat?

This is only semi-related, but have you attempted the "laserpaint" method of PCB making? That is, you take a regular bare copper pcb (no photoresist), spray it with black paint, and then use your regular laser cutter to remove the paint. I have considered buying the cheap chinese laser cutter for this use, so I would like to know if it could do the job :-)

very cool.Could I use black paint instead of photo resist?

Wouldn't it be possible to create a pinhole lens with an extremely fine needle (e.g. the finest cactus needles) and aluminum foil, and move the laser closer? I believe you could increase your resolution quite a bit that way.

Whats the resolution of the PCBs? How many pixels per centimeter are there? Nice project, will make your future ones look even better! Will you replace you old, "hand-made" PCBs with ones made with this machine?

How come no videos in a few weeks, are you okay?

hey er du fra Danmark? (hello are you from Denmark?)

great idea , you could buy an arduino due. It has 96 KB of ram and costs about 15$ on ebay

Aren´t you doin it wrong? Shoudn´t you be burning the space between tracks, instead of the tracks themselves?

but the project is available?

I'm curious to hear why you didn't just make a gcode interface, since there is plenty of software that can generate laser gcode

Hi Excellent Do you have stl files for 3dprint Thanks

Bad ass

it is 250mw?

Use TMC2100 silent (sinusoidal) step motor driver, because this noise is terrible!

Couldn't you keep going back to the memory card rather than loading a whole line in to memory - load one byte, reverse the byte, print it. Go get the next byte, etc? Depending on how the memory is read, there might be a lot of redundant reads that you're just ignoring, but does that matter? You'd be reading bytes A B C D H G F E I J K L P O N M if your image was (a silly) 4 bytes x 4 bytes for example.

Missing more information about the project

make it work over serial port and C#

İ waiting easy mini cnc milling machine .The x-axis will remain constant

Printing the pcb circuit is doing only once and can be used forever and also light exposure time is faster than this method.All the next steps for etching are exactly the same.

whys it so loud

Nice job. I might use your design from thingiverse

it sounds like an old black whote printer :o how? why?

Seriously, 12mm smooth rods? For my 3d printer I would kill to have those but I see no linear bearing, or hell any bearings, on that. Get some bearings on that thing, lol. :)

i need the video were you explain the software

GRBL v.9 and arduino nano...

Nice, but those are about the noisiest steppers I've ever heard.

👌👌👌👌👌👍👍👍👍🙏🙏🙏🌹🌹🌹

So you want people to give you money and buy from your affiliated links but you can't be bothered to share the project files?

405 or 445 nm laser?

can you show how to erase the board by using stepper motor

can i have your mail please

thats not engraving...

gimme the code and get a raspberry pi I'm gonna show you something

Lazy ass configuration, tidy up those wires, typical amateuristic setup.