UV-lightbox

==================== WORK IN PROGRESS =====================================

Some history

I've been tinkering with electronics since I was capable of holding a screwdriver. I was first introduced to circuit-board-fabrication in high-school electronics. The first board I made, was a hand-drawn morse-code-practice-oscillator, centered around a 555-timer. It wasn't the prettiest, but it worked.

The next semester, we fabricated yet another pcb, for a variable power-supply. I've got that power-supply, tucked away, somewhere. When I dig it up, I'll try to take some pictures.

I started a small side-business, after high school, fabricating various electronic devices. A lot of the early designs were using a wire-wrap technique. Sadly it was time-consuming, and fairly error-prone. Additionally tracing-errors was a nightmare. Said pain forced me to move towards fabricating circuit boards.

Baby steps

My first designs, much like my high school projects, were hand drawn, using supplies acquired from Radio Shack. I spent way too much time using their etch-markers and rub-on-stencils and soon realized I had a problem with scaling and reproducabability.

Various electronics-magazines advertised a toner-transfer-method, to ease board fabrication.

Sadly the results were so-so. I learned various tricks, such as scuffing the pcb with sand-paper; then cleaning with acetone, etc.

Getting Fancy

While the toner-transfer-method worked, I needed something fast and accurate.

UV-exposure to the rescue. A friend of mine mentioned creating masks, and exposing the boards to sunlight for a few hours. His results were pretty good... so I started down that route. I'm a night-owl...so sunlight was hard to come-by in the off-hours. So I needed to find a UV source.