Crafting PCBs

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Crafting PCB

Circuit board was once hand-drawn and it really draws me both in terms of aesthetics, but also the object narrative behind, and how much it links to craft making.

Interested idea: PCB that combine hand-drawn aesthetic with digital topology

  • can be at a larger scale, statue-like, and the magnetic particles run across it, a door (a piece of functional existence)

  • or change the conventional material to fabric material with embroidery

  • Process:
    1. Research topoR, how to generate an efficient circuit?
    2. Add aesthetic element found in hand-drawn circuit https://oldcrap.org/ https://oldcrap.org/2020/06/18/panasonic-nv-8200-vcr/ https://oldcrap.org/2019/10/20/atari-sm124-monitor/
    3. Try this circuit: Analog from BEAM Robotics
    4. Try to etch/ print
    5. Enlarge to a statue, try kinetic mechanisms, or
    6. Draw on a scaled piece of cloth? like that of an [[(WIP) Peruvian Textile Amazonian pattern]]
    7. Variation: Multi-layered statue of PCB

Reference

Hand-drawn patterns found on Shutterstock: ![[pcb.png]] ![[shutterstock.com_pcb.png]] ![[alamy.com_pcb.png]] ![[alamy.com_HDTEAE.png]] ![[alamy.com_J0M3BD.png]] ![[pcb2.png]] https://www.instructables.com/Making-a-Hand-Drawn-PCB./

![[UCSC-CRL-92-39.pdf]]

![[rubber_band_PCB_design.pdf]]

![[out.pdf]]

https://youtu.be/euJgtLcWWyo?si=aeAN5_dKkE8MD9XV

in the beginning printed circuit boards were designed by hand every connection was drawn with tape on a giant diagram which was then photographed scaled down and etched into copper because they were hand drawn there were no constraints and most boards from this era have a very unique aesthetic at early cad packages couldn’t cope with your wires being at anything other than a multiple of 45 degrees as a result circuit boards from this era evolved into their own unique aesthetic the rigid robotic roots the cyber sci-fi style and it certainly is a style it’s a look that says technology and this is the way it remained for decades it became culturally ingrained it became expected it became normal so normal that people forgot that the style was born from limitations it’s not the 1980s anymore cad software in the current year can place tracks at arbitrary angles and indeed even wavy lines are possible modern cad software has subsumed many features of modern graphics software if you break away from the grid you make your wires shorter and you can fit more components into the same size board this is taken to its most extreme with a tool called topora the topological auto router it models wires as rubber bands and generates a layout with the most efficient routing it is ruthlessly efficient every track is as short as it can be if you only care about functionality and not about aesthetics then every circuit board should look like this ![[pcb_topo.png]] ![[topora design.png]]

https://oldcrap.org/ ![[oldcrap_pcb.png]] ease of design the way cad software is written limiting yourself to 45 degree bends is simply the easiest option if you want to quickly throw a design together you’re not going to care about the corner style and more importantly if you want to edit a design or rearrange things then it’s much easier if you haven’t got rounded corners simply because of the way the software was written ![[pcb_reference.png]] ![[reference_pcb2.png]] ![[reference_pcb3.png]] ![[reference_pcb4.png]] ![[reference_pcb5.png]]

https://www.eremex.com/products/topor/ https://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad http://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad_2 https://github.com/mitxela/kicad-round-tracks

Layering ![[the stack.png]]

  • [[A Non-Functional Function]]