Direct-to-PCB Laser Printing

This is a cross-post from  muffin’s blog!

Over the weekend, Dan disassembled a laser printer that he found in the trash. He was able to tear it down to the point where he could fit a board in the (quite linear) print path and gave it a go. To his dismay, the board jammed and nicked the heating drum. I came over and we decided that by removing a metal guide and chamfering the edge of the circuit board, we’d have better luck – and we did! The print quality turned out pretty good, but the toner wasn’t fusing to the board. We figured that it was either a heat/pressure issue or a charge issue and called it a night.

The next day, Dan and I went to [miters](http://miters.mit.edu) to improve the process. We tried a whole slew of ideas include charge compensation, increasing roller pressure, and pre-heating the boards to get the toner to fuse. The last one did the trick. Although print quality isn’t 100% there yet, we’re certain that we can hammer out those last pixels and get this process rolling. We etched my first lab in 6.331 – a 4MHz 50-ohm line driver with 2 watts of output power.

More to come next weekend!