Color PCBs

[JohanH]

Apparently one of the manufacturers can now create color PCBs.

They use some kind of UV printing.

https://prodocs.easyeda.com/en/pcb/other-draw-colorful-silkscreen/index.html

Imagine the possibilities for front panels.

Photo by Robert Feranec.

[CountChocula]

Pretty neat. The quality doesn't seem great, but it'll probably get better over time if this catches on and is affordable enough to generate sufficient volume. Too bad this only works with JLC's own EDA software, at least for now.

I wonder how expensive it'll be…


—CC

[JohanH]

It shouldn't be hard to figure out the format of the color silkscreen from their gerber files.

[CountChocula]

It shouldn't be hard to figure out the format of the color silkscreen from their gerber files.

Agreed. Still, here's to hoping that eventually the functionality is built right into other EDA packages… that would be fun

[AndyC_772]

I'd be surprised if they can't manage to understand a set of separate Gerber layers, one per colour.

[Alex Eisenhut]

I want one of those bare PCBs, it's beautiful.

[1276-2449-1-ND]

It's done with a UV flatbed printer. Chinese ones are down to around $2000 last I looked. I was going to get one for making front panels, but the printers need to be used every day or the UV ink solidifies in the print head, and I don't have that kind of volume.

The quality of that print doesn't look so great. UV printers can get inkjet quality prints (they use Epson print heads), and they also print white so colours can be printed on the white printed parts so the colours pop. UV LEDs on the print head cure the epoxy ink as soon as it's printed.

[Doctorandus_P]

It probably has it's uses, but this looks lie a bad example. For this one I'd rather have a single color silkscreen with crisp letters instead of these mushy color blobs.