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Monday, December 19, 2022

Shaker for PCB etching

This is an old project, that was sitting in the cabinet for a very long time and I just finished it a week ago. It uses an old computer DVD drive (no one ever uses them anymore). It is completely stripped from all electronics and mechanics except for the parts that move the tray in and out. The motor inside is a simple DC motor.

The shaker uses an 8-pin microcontroller PIC16F15313 and a motor driver module based on DVR8833 chip.

There are two NO reed switches that are mounted on the case and two magnets glued on the moving tray. When one of the switches is closed by the magnet the microcontroller reverse the direction of the tray. There is also an potentiometer connected to an analog pin which control the movement speed of the tray.

The shaker is supplied with 12Vdc from an power adapter. It will work with voltages from 6V to 12V. For the microcontroller there is a 78L05 voltage regulator.

At first there was an power resistor mounted on the bottom of the aluminium sheet and connected directly to the 12V rail. The idea was to heat up the container with the etch solution, but because the container is plastic there was not much heat transfer going on and I removed it. Now I heat up the solution in the microwave oven first, and then I put the PCB in and use the shaker.

The circuit is assembled on piece of perfboard.

 





When using this shaker make sure the speed is not too high, because there is a risk of spilling potentially dangerous liquid around.

The code for the microcontroller is created in MPLAB X v6.08 and can be downloaded from here: Shaker_Source_Code.


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