DIY Electronics Perf Board - 3DP Concept

thingiverse

This is my very successful, first attempt at making a PCB using a 3D printed substrate. Essentially a DIY electronics low voltage Pref board customized to any application. I have been building DIY circuit boards for my home projects over the last 10 years. I previously used scrapped FR4 PCB boards (recycled) in all my past projects. All components are removed, and leads/traces carefully sanded off. New Component holes are drilled using an old breadboard as a pin guide. Headers are crazy glued, connections are made using wire traces and a tight loop method is used to solder everything down. Of course this process is really time consuming but has worked very successfully on all of my past projects. The majority of PCBs I have been designing as of late are low voltage interface boards for Arduino tech. I had the idea with my current project (future post……robot maybe...) to attempt to make a custom 3D printed substrate to cut out all the issues with reworking a recycled PCB. I could CAD in all of the component pin holes, and design a 1.6mm plate of any shape and size. Being made of PLA the board would of course meltdown quickly in the presence of high temps but would work great for digital low voltage applications. This being the first attempt I wanted to prove you could easily solder on PLA without damaging the board or affecting the joint of the solder. It worked so good I finished the entire project board while testing and had no issues. Sorry, I didn’t take the time to sketch in the component holes and merely hand drilled. I was just testing the concept this time around. But I have already collected a lot of .stls on thingiverse for most of the common headers and parts I typically implement. Can’t wait to layout the next project using this concept. I included some pics of some of the old FR4 recycled PCBs I have designed in the past. Enjoy