The Ch00ftech Guide to PCB Printing

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I typically make my own PCBs for my projects.  I’ve gotten much better at this process over the past few months, and I’ve been promising a “super awesome writeup” on my techniques for almost a year now. I figured that a video would do more than a writeup and spent the weekend producing one for you.

So here you have it!  The video is a good 40 minutes long, but it’s packed with details that should hopefully help you avoid some of the time consuming mistakes I’ve made.

No, I won’t make you a Chris Jericho jacket, but here’s how I would if I wanted to

I’ve done a few commissioned pieces for artists and musicians on this blog, but I would like to make it clear that my primary objective is to provide educational content for my viewers and to also catalog my work for my own future reference.

Basically, I’d be happy to make something for you as long as it is sufficiently challenging, new, and interesting.  The DJ Jacket and ongoing EL Panel shirt projects are examples of this.

If it would make an interesting blog post, I’m all about it.  Unfortunately, I’ve gotten numerous requests for something that I don’t think would make a very interesting project/blog post, so I’m addressing it briefly here to help those who would like to make it for themselves.

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In Which I Begin to Lose My Mind

In my last post, I attempted to reverse engineer an EL wire power supply to see how it worked.  This brought up a few more questions that I decided to investigate, and the following investigation brought me to the brink of insanity and back.  I started to doubt the very consistency of space and time as time and time again my measurements seemed to prove what I knew should be impossible.

Seriously, ask any of my friends.  I haven’t been able to shut up about this all week. Continue reading

Why you don’t make right-angle traces and why lightning rods are pointy

After I posted the menorah yesterday where I said in passing that you’re not supposed to have circuit traces bend at right angles, I got a few questions from readers asking exactly why this is.  The explanation is kind of complicated and involves some of Maxwell’s equations as well as multivariable calculus, but I’ll do my best to explain it in a way that doesn’t require any special knowledge of either of these topics.  This is going to be a doozy, so read on if you dare.

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