{"id":29380,"date":"2021-01-27T02:07:35","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cornay.co.za\/wp\/?p=29380"},"modified":"2021-01-27T02:07:35","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:07:35","slug":"dreaming-of-a-transparent-pcb-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cornay.co.za\/wp\/2021\/01\/27\/dreaming-of-a-transparent-pcb-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming of a Transparent (PCB) Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Carl] wanted to put his force sensors on a transparent PCB and had to ask his board vendor for a special sample. Flexible PCBs are available on transparent substrates made of PET, but they are not as common as polyimide boards. As [Carl] found out, these boards are a bit thicker, a bit less flexible, and don’t hold up to very high heat as well as the standard boards. Undeterred, he designed a 3D Christmas tree<\/a> using the clear boards. The result that you can see in the video below looks pretty good and would have been hard to duplicate with conventional means.<\/p>\n

When you build the board it is as a flat spiral, but lifting it in the center allows it to expand into a conical tree shape. The circuit itself is just an LED blinker, but the flexible board is the interesting part.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Don’t let the heat put you off, as though the boards deformed at temperatures around 215C and require careful soldering, your projects will probably not run at that temperature.<\/p>\n

There was a time when any sort of flexible PCB was a big project. Now it is easily done and not particularly expensive. [Carl] mentions he violates some best practices for the sake of speed and aesthetics, but the result works fine and it looks pretty cool.<\/p>\n

We’ve noticed that [Carl] really likes flexible PCBs<\/a>. We’ve also noticed they wind up in a lot of artsy projects<\/a>.<\/p>\n