[Today’s run: 2 miles with wife and dog]
After half a dozen aborted tries I finally got a good PC board made.
This is part of the GPS-DO project. The GPS itself is a Resolution-T from Trimble. It has a small set (2×4) of header pins which are used for the I/O. It also has an antenna jack for the GPS antenna. I didn’t want to order some kind of cable to attach to those pins. I do have a mating header piece that I can mount on a PC board. So I decided to make a small board using that piece and through-wire connections with traces to each header pin. That way I can unplug the thing if I need to take it out.
I’ve done ok with simple toner-transfer boards before, I was kind of mystified as to why this time it wasn’t working. So this blog post will help remind me how I did it:
1) I used the cover from a glossy alumni news magazine thing that came from ISU. The cover was a bit thicker than the pages. Thin and glossy usually jams in the printer but this thicker stuff worked well. Don’t use the part with the printed mailing address, that may have been laser printed on.
2) More about pressure, less about heat. My failed attempts, I was trying to use a lot of heat. This time I used more pressure. I put a dab of glue-stick on a non-patterned part of the printed paper and stuck it on the clean, cold pc board.
3) I covered with a clean sheet of white paper
4) Ironed with the clothes iron on highest setting, no-steam, using the edge of the iron to really burnish it on . I had well worked-over that sheet of clean white paper, showing the outline of my pattern paper and of the board. I moved the white paper and did it some more.
5) Peel off the plain white. Soaking in water for 10+ minutes, the pattern paper fell right off. I used a small scrub brush to finish it up.
6) Thin sharpie to touch up any traces that had thin spots
7) Also, don’t forget to printed it as “mirrored”. The transfer process mirrors it back to what you see in Eagle Cad.