Making circuit boards - easy?

[NightShift]

I have a bunch of bright red LED's - about 60 - from a brake light. From this I wanted to make small clusters out of them for other purposes such as retrofitting brake lights, so I ended up breaking the circuit board and gluing them together to make a cluster, then mending the circuit to work right. The way im doing it is messy and flimsy and it would be great to design my own circuit board at home - to mount the LEDs on a sturdy surface and have a solid, evenly spaced cluster construction....

Is this easy to do?

If it is, could someone tell what it involves and the things I would need from RadioShack, if they are available there? If it is simple and cheap, im sure it would be fun doing.

Thanks :P

 

[papasan]

go to radio shack and buy there perfboard...it's fiberglass PCB that has a grid of holes evenly spaced in it and copper around the holes to solder to...easy as pie...

comes in different grid sizes, so make sure you get the right size...

 

[NightShift]

Thanks, that sounds easy enough. In regard to the different grid sizes...can I just cut the board to the size I need it?

Also, to make the connections underneath, what do you commonly use - small wire...paths of solder?

 

[papasan]

yeah...think of the grid as a piece of graph paper, the holes are at the intersections of the lines...

i'm not sure on the material they're made out of, but it's probably fr-4 or fiberglass...thickness of thin corregated cardboard but much stiffer and stronger...cut it with a dremel or a hacksaw or something like that...

if the traces are right next to each other i usually use solder bridges, they're much easier than trying to solder a small piece of wire down...use wire for longer traces...

good luck...

 

[papasan]

oh yeah, another option for making traces...there's a conductive pen out that writes in a conductive silver 'ink'...you could just draw your traces out...never tried or seen it done, but i have seen them on digi-key and a couple other places...

 

[NightShift]

Hey papasan, when i found the boards in radioshack there were two kinds...."Prepunched Perfboard" which was just the grid with holes and "General-Purpose Component PC Board" which was exactly the same but has copper around the holes on one side and a grid and numbering on the other side. Well I didnt know which one to get so I got both....they were cheap enough anyway :P
Whats the difference...just one has copper so the solder sticks and holds the compoents tight to the board?

 

[papasan]

yeah, you want the copper clad one...plain fiberglass doesn't hold solder very well and your LEDs might come off...sorry about that, should have explained better...let me know how it goes...