Planet Arduino

In many locations you can get PCBs made fast, cheap, and of very good quality. In Brazil, where Vítor Barbosa lives, this isn’t the case, so he built a “haxmark460” PCB printer to help manufacture circuits at home.

The build modifies a Lexmark E460dn laserjet printer to mark PCBs directly, using an aluminum carrier plate instead of its normal paper feed operation.

An Arduino is utilized to hijack and output printer signals, enabling it to it to work in a much different way than how it was originally designed. The carrier plate, with blank PCB material taped on, is fed into the front and the PCB is pulled through and properly marked by the printer. After a dip in acetone to allow the toner to stick to the copper, the board is ready to etch!

After you’ve taken the plunge and decided to learn how to etch your own circuit boards, you’ll quickly find even the simplest boards are still out of your grasp. This is due mostly to the two-layer nature of most PCBs, and turn making a homemade Arduino board an exercise in frustration and improving your vocabulary of four-letter words.

After looking around for an easy-to-manufacture single-sided Arduino board, [Johan] realized there weren’t many options for someone new to board etching. He created the Nanino, quite possibly the simplist Arduino compatible board that can be made in a kitchen sink.

Billing it as something between the Veroduino and the Diavolino, [Johan]‘s board does away with all the complexities of true Arduinos by throwing out the USB interface and FTDI chip. A very small parts count makes the Nanino much less expensive to produce in quantity than even the official Arduino single sided board.

For an introduction to etching your own PCBs at home, we couldn’t think of a better first board. As an Arduino, you’re guaranteed to find some use for it and the ease of manufacture and low parts count makes it the perfect subject for your hackerspace’s next tutorial series.