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Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.

Posted by TheFerminator 
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TheFerminator
Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
September 17, 2012 02:32PM
Hello, I've been thinking about ways to print circuits. I've been looking at some liquid/paste printers and conductive ink.

Would it be possible to make a low viscosity conductive glue with a low resistance, and extrude it into a board with troughs printed from abs?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the hardest part would be making the glue with a low resistance at a low price. Liquid and clay printers exist, so if we could make a glue/paint with the correct fluid properties it should work right?
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fest
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
September 17, 2012 04:02PM
Not exactly "printing" a circuit, but I have heard of an idea to deposit circuit as a single layer of ABS/PLA plastic on regular copper-plated PCB and then etch the rest of the copper away using FeCL3.
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jamesdanielv
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
September 17, 2012 08:36PM
This is not glue, but pcb have been repaired for years by silver ink.

you could use silver ink, but it needs to be well mixed before being dispenced. it is around 2ohms an inch for a 1/8inch wide trace, or around that.

also if you bake the silver ink when done you can solder it. i would not bake it with abs trenches.

i think silver ink is just silver in a solution, the solution when disolved leaves behing silver particles bonded to the pcb or paper surface.
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TheFerminator
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
September 17, 2012 10:15PM
I've been seeing graphite glue that is conductive, but has a high resistance. The reason they used graphite was to lower cost. Maybe fine aluminum powder in some sort of bonding agent would work?
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Trevarthan
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 21, 2012 06:35PM
Like this conductive paint? [www.thinkgeek.com]

Seems like drying time, electrical resistance, and electrical current capacity would be the key factors.
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geoffd
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 22, 2012 04:19AM
Take a look at this: Carbomorph

G


How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else. - R. Buckminster Fuller

[apapageek.com]
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Trevarthan
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 22, 2012 09:31AM
I like the way they use the world percolation in relation to the movement of electrons. I thought people only used that word for coffee. In all seriousness though, I've never seen ohms listed this way: 0.09±0.01 ohm m^−1

Is that high resistance or low resistance? I'm not sure what the m^-1 does.

The piezo resistive thing seems like a liability in most cases.
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Trevarthan
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 22, 2012 09:35AM
Ah, here we go. I don't know if this is the same stuff that thinkgeek is selling, but it has a datasheet. Looks like ohms increase rather quickly with length of conductive surface (see page 3 of the PDF): [dlnmh9ip6v2uc.cloudfront.net]
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Trevarthan
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 22, 2012 09:54AM
Paper on inkjet printing of copper. They talk about using a laser to solder the copper after printed. Interesting stuff. [www.sciencedirect.com]
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Trevarthan
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
December 22, 2012 10:30AM
Maybe it is best to print circuits using a laserjet for now. This document is old, but the process looks pretty simple. Copper sheet, paper, an iron, a laser printer, and some household chemicals: [fullnet.com]
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Annirak
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
January 17, 2013 07:48AM
3M doesn't advertise it much, but they have a conductive polyurethane which is compatible with ABS (and presumably PLA). I have 1kg of it in pellet form. I haven't done much with it because the initial results were disappointing: the resistance across a single 3mm pellet was ~1kOhm. With that kind of conductivity, it would certainly need some kind of additive (graphite? Copper dust?) to make it usable.
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VDX
Re: Thoughts about printing circuits. Need to bounce some ideas off someone.
January 17, 2013 09:02AM
... look into laser-induced MID ( [www.lpkfusa.com] ) - here you fab with a plastic containing some particles, that aren't conducting when printed, but went conductive, when heated with a laser.

Then you can grow galvanicall some more metal on this laser-drwan lines, so they will be stable enough to carry higher currents or soldered components ...

Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]
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