UV LED PCB Exposure box (of doom)

[thesaxmachine]

The more I got into electronics, the more I needed custom boards made. So I built this box out of LEDs from ebay and a cheap box from Micheal's. It works great for single sided boards. I still have to perfect my technique for double sided.

[Tetragrammatron]

Very nice!! Do you have plans to make it a double sided box?

[thesaxmachine]

Haven't thought about it actually. But it would seem to be the likely thing to do.

[rsilk]

That turned out really well! What do you use to print your masks?

[thesaxmachine]

MG Chemicals Presensitized boards. You can get them at either B&E Electronics here in town or Digikey.

[rsilk]

I assumed as much. But you need a photo mask to expose the pattern (usually printed on a transparency). We've had trouble in the past getting a dense enough print. Though now that I think about it, we were doing a toner transfer. Never mind.

[thesaxmachine]

Ink jet transparencies from Staples. I experimented a little with tracing paper and vellum, but with the LEDs it didn't work too well.

[Bergo]

My wife was into doing gel nails for a while, and I have a few left over UV CCFL's from her curing lamps. was thinking of doing something similar to this. Is it particularily advantageous to use LEDs?

[thesaxmachine]

Not really anything super advantageous. I made sure the wavelength matched o what the boards would expose to.