Event details
This was the focus of the meeting. Participants drew a design with a permanent marker on a small circuit board and the exposed copper was etched away. This illustrates the process of making a circuit board that you can attach components to.
The etchant consists of swimming pool acid and hydrogen peroxide. The proportions and safety considerations are readily available on the internet so do your research and be careful.
Some pennys were partially immersed in the solution to see what would happen.
We meet the first and third Saturday of the month at 5:00pm at the Kimono Dragon in Picayune. This meeting was supported by a grant to Public Lab organizers by Rackspace. The grant was used to purchase electronic components and supplies to build complex circuits.
Background
The turnout totaled 12 with a very diverse age range from elementary school to retired.
We are looking forward to future meetings where we will convert an old toaster oven into a solder oven to attach surface mount components to the circuit boards.
2 Comments
This is fantastic!!! Would love to see the resulting how-to. Also, random fact which may or may not have anything to do with etching, pennies made after 1982 are actually 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper! http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/?action=fun_facts2
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Nicholas - There are a lot of how-to instructions on etching circuit boards on the Internet if that is what you want to know. I plan on documenting how we convert the toaster oven when we get going on that. Yes "copper" pennies only have a copper plating. We did not etch all of the copper off a penny to get to the zinc.
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