Tony Goacher Turns to a Laser Cutter as a Silkscreen Alternative for Home-Milled PCBs
If you don't fancy messing around with silkscreen meshes and ink, a laser cutter can be deployed to label PCBs.
Maker Tony Goacher has come up with a way to label homemade circuit boards without having to do any silkscreen printing — by marking the board with a laser cutter instead.
"I've designed a distribution PCB for my TrakTrike project," Goacher explains, referring to an ungoing project to create a powered trike which uses compact caterpillar tracks where the rear wheels would usually be found. "I normally CNC route my PCBs, but with many connectors on this one I'd like to be able to label them. I wondered if I could use my laser cutter…"
Traditionally, the labeling of a printed circuit board is performed using silkscreen printing, where ink is physically pushed through a stencil mesh to mark the board. It's achievable by hand, but automating the process requires equipment not readily accessible to the maker on a budget — which is where Goacher's idea to use the laser cutter he already has came in.
"This PCB has got a lot of connectors on it," Goacher explains, "and I really like a silkscreen, but obviously I can't really do that with a CNC router. But then I thought, would I be able to use a laser cutter to do it? I exported the silkscreen and loaded it up into Lightburn."
By isolating the board outline and firing into scrap to position the PCB correctly, Goacher was able to etch markings onto the board without the mess of a manual silkscreen print run — though it took a few tries to dial in the settings, with a slow cutting speed and low laser power required for best results.
"Would I use this technique again? Well, yeah, I think I probably would," Goacher concludes in the video, available embedded above and on Goacher's YouTube channel.