/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2034900
>implying

>>2015946
>in thirty seconds or less
Are they really that fast?

>planning to tin the boards using home made tinning solution
Electroplating the existing copper, right?

>not sure how I'd plate vias and through holes
I've spent a fair bit of time looking into it. There's a few methods.
Firstly is the cheap method you're probably familiar with if you spend time on this general, electroforming. Getting very fine graphite mixed with ink or paint or glue and spitting it through the holes, to electroplate them later.
Secondly is the budget method, rivets. There exist through-hole rivets that you need a somewhat specialised tool to crimp onto the board. They work to some extent, but are a pain to install and might not work in close quarters, like sub-0.1" pitch.
Thirdly is the professional method, electroless plating, though there's a few different sorts. In industry I think they use what's called electroless palladium plating, whereby a solution of palladium and tin chloride is left to dry on the inside of the holes, and bake it, causing the solution to react with something and deposit a thin layer of metal on the surface, which is then electroplated with copper. There's also electroless copper plating, for which there's an Applied Science video on the topic, but it doesn't look very stable; the solution becomes unusable after a while so you have to prepare a new one. Personally I'm interested in using a silver nitrate bath to see if I can plate a thin layer of silver inside the holes, to electroplate later. Got no chemical setup to try it though.

Plated through-holes are important for making double-sided PCBs, especially for kits. Many components sit flat on the board, like electrolytic capacitors, IC sockets, crystals, etc. that make soldering both sides impossible. Putting solid-core copper wire vias next to each pad is a slapdash solution. It is for this reason that I've temporarily transitioned into a holeless PCB designing state, pic related.

>>1991339
Is that a name-brand XT-60? I've heard that no-brand ones are made of shitty plastic that melts at a lower temperature, hence why the guys over at /diy/rcg recommended that I get name-brand (Amass in this case) connectors. I also use leaded solder. Instead of tinning the wire first, I prefer to wipe some solder paste inside the solder cups, insert un-tinned wire, and jam the soldering iron set to 350C with a big (T12-K) tip, and feed in as much solder wire as possible. Sometimes the large tip causes the sides of the plastic to get a bit melty, but so long as the extra cable shield will still fit on it's not usually an issue.

>>1991395
Just wipe off the tip with copper wool. If you don't have any, quickly wiping with some ordinary facial tissues works pretty well. Then get some soldering flux. Do not sandpaper the tip.

>>1991571
Double-sided is a pain for hobbyists because PCB design software assumes you've got plated-through-holes. Soldering both sides of an IC is possible, but makes it impossible to desolder and doesn't apply to IC sockets or other flush parts. Vias are somewhat easy, just using solid-core wire and the right-size drill and maybe some hammering, but drilling is a whole exercise in itself. Those carbide PCB drills break easy, at least if you're not using a drill-press. Not to mention having to align the two sides. I'd personally recommend single-sided etching with jumpers for this reason. Bonus points for SMTing everything, picrel. That said, the flexibility of a 2-sided board is hard to beat, so it might be worth trying anyhow.

And look to using PCB fab-houses, which may or may not be viable, depending on whether you live in a place with horrible import duties.

>>1983954
DONE

Some debugging required. First, before even finishing soldering, I realised my main pot was wired wrong, as to not give a total gain of 1 across the two inverting amps. That took some scratching and rewiring to fix. Then, after powering it on, I noticed that summing the output and input together looked more like a subtraction, suggesting that one of the two inverting stages wasn't working properly, which also meant bad news for the gain thing. Turns out I'd wired an inverting amp instead as a buffer but with series and parallel resistances (that did nothing), which also took some scraping and rewiring to fix. Then there was a bit of noise, which required three ceramic caps placed about. Also the weird overdrive-like thing (using diodes in a parallel feedback loop) seems to increase its amplitude too much, which isn't ideal but I can't really change it without drastically changing how the circuit functions. And the knobs stick below the base of the PCB. Should be fine as-is, and it will have to be because it's already wrapped up.