I've been looking at sheets of circuit board for making my own contact boards for larger pills and reconfiguring battery setups. I see lots for sale on Aliexpress, and need info on the proper kind for my needs. I see glass resin boards, and boards with copper on one or both sides.
Could someone explain the properties of these boards? What would be the best choice for my needs? Can you solder directly to these boards?
I expect you’ll want copper-clad one sided unless you are going to require traces on both sides to solder to. Have you etched boards before? They’re typically made of glass-reinforced epoxy laminate (FR-4).
I’ve never even seen a board before. I’ll probably want to make contact points and just use wires instead of traces. I will want one side of the board conected to contacts on the other side. If the board is copper coated, wouldn’t the whole side then be conductive? Can you solder directly to the glass-epoxy resin boards.
Copper is conductive and solderable. FR4 (The actual Circuit Board Material) is neither solderable nor conductive.
The boards you're looking at are going to be one of three things:
bare prepreg, single sided copper clad, double sided copper clad.
bare prepreg is (for your purposes) merely a sheet of FR4. It may as well be plastic. Nothing about the board is solderable or conductive. Full insulator.
single sided copper is FR4 with copper bonded to one side. The copper will be solderable, and the entire side of the sheet will be conductive.
double sided copper is FR4 with copper bonded to both sides. The copper will be solderable and each side of the sheet will be conductive. It will not, however, conduct between sided.
I think you need to go visit wikipedia or some such site and learn what PCB Material is. It's difficult to explain without a bunch of pictures.
PPtk
W/ any PCB you’ll want to first use a proto-board [breadboard] to assemble the circuit. Then you have to work out the wiring diagram for the PCB and make an etch-mask for the circuit. Finally you use etch [ferric chloride] to etch the circuit then solder the components. Simple, yes?
Typically designers use through-hole plating to connect both sides, like this:
Depending on your design you may be able to get around this with some drilling, and solder wire to connect.
Also, this might be of interest:
I have some of These in the mail from FT. Maybe I should wait and have a close inspection of its uses for me.
Basically, I want to make a lid for the top end of a 4P soupcan light in order to reconfigure it to 2S2P. I want to wire the underside so it links the cells how I want, and lead these to contacts on the topside so it will align with the pos. and ground rings of the driver.
Wow. This is very interesting, and opens up some modding solutions for me. Thanks for the info PilotPTK and Gurthang… and Chloe for the instructables link. I’ll have to look around for the availability of ferric chloride. Its the masking agent I’m not sure about. Something easy to use, and easy to find. I don’t want to get too complex or costly.
I was just thinking about gum Arabic as a masking agent. When I was in art college, we used it as a masking agent while etching our litho stones or aluminum plates with sulfuric acid. It’s clear, paints on like water, and washes off with water. Does anyone know how it would react to ferric chloride?
Perhaps it goes against the whole BLF/DIY/Learning aspect but depending on your light would it be possible to use/modify an existing battery carrier?
Guess it comes down to what soupcan light you are trying to mod and whether it takes a carrier but unless you really just want to learn about making boards perhaps there is a simpler way of going from 4P to 2S2P. 