Did you ever wonder how your PCB maker uses Gerber file? It doesn’t have to do with baby food. Gerber was the first company to introduce photoploting. The xenon bulb was used to project images from an aperture onto a piece of film. This film can then be used for photolithography. It has many uses, including the making of printed circuit boards. [Wil Straver] He decided to create his own photoplotter by using a 3D printer with two dimensions and a UV light emitting diode. See the video to see the final results.
The small 3D-printed assembly contains a circuit board, an LED, and a magnet that holds it all together to the 3D printer. He creates a small aperture of 0.3mm by printing a mold, then uses epoxy to cast the part that contacts PCB film.
The fan control is used to turn the LED on or off like 3D printer laser cutter mods. We noticed he uses standard nuts as heat set inserts, and that seems to work well enough, especially since there isn’t much load on them in this application. The final version seems to work well after a few variations of mounts and pinholes. Even double-sided boards can be done.
With a laser cutter, and good focusing, it is possible to pull off the same trick. Just be aware that some of the “high power” laser modules don’t focus to a dot because of their internal construction. Turns out, there’s more than one way to have a printer help you with PCB production.