Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner onto your copper clad, if that doesn’t work use some water and some lacquer or something, I don’t know, I stopped reading at that point because the last time I saw a laser printer, a magazine and a clothes iron was in the nineties.
Until recently, the only ways I knew to make PCBs was to practice the dark art above, to pay $10 and wait three weeks to get professional-looking PCBs from China, or to pay $60 and wait three days to get professional-looking PCBs from Europe. It was “cheap, fast, actually doable by a human person, choose two”.
That always bugged me, it shouldn’t be like that, I have always been of the opinion that there shouldn’t be things you can’t make when you have a 3D printer, but PCBs have consistently eluded me. I yearned for them, I wanted to be able to make them at home, but it seemed impossible.
One day, everything changed.
