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Friday 31 May 2013

Direct PCB printing with Xerox Phaser 8400

Almost a year ago, I purchased a beautiful Xerox Phaser 8400 with 250000 pages already printed, because I wanted to try out the direct PCB printing method. I purchased some "pyralux" blank PCBs from here: Tech-place. Now, after one and a half year, it is time to try out what is possible.
  • Paper/PCB Size
    The size of the PCB is around 150mm x 115mm. The Xerox manual says, that the minimum paper size should be: 75mm x 127mm - I am in the range, so that's good. My PCB is bigger than an A6.
  • Which Side Gets the Ink:
    It is an experiment. You load a paper with a writing on it, and print something on it. The ink goes to the back of the paper, so I will need to load my PCB with the copper facing down.
  • Paper/PCB Thickness
    In theory, the width of the PCB is 150um. So I looked up the supported papers in the manual, and searched for the thickest one was: Phaser Professional Solid Ink Business Cards, 225 g/m2 (80 lb. Cover) Now I needed to map this information to a thickness. Unfortunately, I failed to find a datasheet for that paper. However, I found this chart which basically tells me that 150 um is around 110 g/m2. I am convinced, my PCB will fit in, this beast can deal with 225g/m2 paper.
  • Print
    The print was successful, see this photo:
    And, if you want to see a video of the steps above, be my guest: