Ian Dunn
I've been a maker and an electronics enthusiast for my whole life. Designing custom PCB's is a specialty of mine. Somewhere along the way I realized that PCB's are a perfect medium for artistic works as well as electronic circuits. I have to give credit to Kelly Heaton for inspiring me to actually try it. I've created several circuit board art pieces and learned a lot along the way. I wrote this guide to share what I've learned about making art from printed circuit boards. I'll talk about making basic 2 dimensional PCB art, PCB art with electronic components, and how to make a PCB that is both beautiful and has electrical functionality. This guide is also relevant if your focus is PCB's that serve a primary function, but you also want them to look good.
The Kickstarter campaign for the Tux Penguin ATX motherboard was unsuccessful. I had a lot of fun making it, and it will not be my last PCB art piece. Follow me here on Hackaday.io for more cool projects in the future. You can also visit my website, www.boltind.com where I have some PCB art for sale, and a lot of other cool open source stuff that's free for the taking.
It is a tradition of mine to write a Hackaday guide to accompany my Kickstarter projects, so here's everything you need to know to make your own circuit board art.
Solder Mask Colors and Copper Underneath
When it comes to PCB's, you're somewhat limited when it comes to colors. You can choose your solder mask color, and copper surface finish. Standard solder mask colors at most board houses are Green, Black, Red, White, Blue, yellow, and Purple. Black is the easiest to work with by far. It's usually a nice flat matte black color that looks really sharp. Some board houses seem to use a glossy black that is not nearly as nice. The other thing about black is that it['s opaque, so having copper underneath it won't really change it's appearance. All the same things are true about white. It is opaque, and white regardless of what is underneath it.
Pretty much any other solder mask color tends to be translucent, so you'll see the shiny copper traces or copper ground plane underneath it. This can be a problem with some colors. Green, Blue and Purple become washed out and dull if you add a copper ground plane underneath them. Smaller traces will be the same dull color, but it's not as noticeable on a small trace. It you want one of these colors, solder mask on top of the bare FR-4 without copper yields a much better color in most cases. The opposite is true of Yellow and red. I find that yellow looks a whole lot more Yellow with shiny copper underneath. Yellow on top of bare FR-4 is just plain ugly if you ask me. Red can go both ways. It's shiny and bright if placed on top of a copper ground plane. It's a little more muted if placed on top of bare FR-4, but still very red.
This is an image from an article on Hackaday.com that talks all about layers and solder mask colors. It does a great job of showing how each solder mask color looks. The link to the article is below.
Surface Finish
There are really only two options that I recommend for surface finish. ENIG (Electroless Nickel Emmersion Gold) or HASL (Hot Air Surface Leveling.) There are other options out there but they are a little exotic and a lot more expensive. I usually stick to ENIG. ENIG is a gold plated finish so it's more costly than HASL. HASL is just plain old silver colored solder in your choice of leaded or unleaded. There is not much of anything attractive about silvery gray solder, so ENIG is my go to choice. However I recommend always ordering the first board with HASL because no matter how confidant you are of your design, you will always want to change something when you actually get your board. Once you've got your board perfected with...
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Mike Teachman
Bhavesh Kakwani
PCB designer
I signed up on hackaday.io to join the discussion on this awesome guide and to thank you for it, Ian.
I learned a lot reading through this guide that I have been trying to figure out for a while and it is easily the most informative thing I've read on the subject. I was excited to see someone else love USSR components as much as I do as well. They're not from the USSR (that I know of), but have you seen transparent epoxy film capacitors? I saw one in a broken old smoke detector and they're my most recent cute component obsession.
I also wanted to share some tricks I've learned especially in regards to your section about tracing images that I think can make your life easier.
I mostly use DipTrace but have used EasyEDA in the past. I was pretty surprised the first time I imported an image into EasyEDA and DipTrace with how botched they became like you described - especially because EasyEDA will even let you import SVGs, which I had hoped would mitigate the damage they do to the image since it's a vector.
If you have access to a vector editor, artwork can be exported to DXF which can then be imported into EDAs and placed onto nearly any layer, crystal clear. I have yet to take full advantage of it - I have a guitar pedal gerber somewhere on my computer that has Bart Simpson's head as the board cutout that I haven't gotten fabricated - but I have used this method a ton for silkscreen logos that look sharp even as small as 3mm or so and other similar small graphic elements.
DipTrace can't scale DXF objects - I'm unsure if EasyEDA can - so it can be a bit finicky nailing the dimensions ahead of time.
I've had enough success with just using DXFs for my level of creativity, but considering how similar gerbers are to PDFs, and how easy it is to convert gerber layers to SVGs, I've looked into both of these tools:
- https://swannman.github.io/pdf2gerb/
- https://pypi.org/project/gerbolyze/
The Hackaday blog wrote up Gerbolyze (https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/svg-to-gerber-without-the-pain/) which undersold it initially to me, as I just imagined it's functionality as the DXF importing I talked about above. But once I realized what it can do I've been dying to come up with an excuse to use it. It shoots out a gerber layer as an SVG that can be edited in a vector program, but then can be repackaged straight back to gerber without reopening an EDA.
As a graphic designer more at home in Illustrator than DipTrace, it seems about as ideal as it could be to avoid my headaches associated with what essentially amounts to using EDAs as graphic design tools. Even for things as simple as component markings for example. DipTrace's font handling is frustrating compared to EasyEDAs, and if you have typefaces with more variations than just regular, bold and italic, it'll be a crapshoot if it actually uses say, the "bold" weight or the "black" weight - which is a huge difference at such small sizes.
Thanks again for the awesome guide, Ian.