You Don't Need LEDs to Light Up Your Next Board — Let the PCB Glow with All the Colors of a Rainbow!

Masks are a hot topic these days — and I'm not talking about face coverings!

In recent years, cheaper PCB fabrication options have expanded, and allowed designers to experiment with different combinations of board stackups.

We now have PCB pool — ordering options for flexible FPC substrates, 0.8mm four-layer laminates, even eight-plane PCBs are now starting to become available — for the price of peanuts.

This has enabled homebrew to take off in all things digital — the average hardware hacker has resource at their fingertips to hack together a FPGA host board, or wrapped up in wearables with flex.

More so than just experiments into function, this reduction in costs has led to experimentation into form — focusing on the PCB as more than a collection of circuits, but as an artistic platform.

"How so?" I hear the kids in the back ask...

There's more to a PCB than copper and fiberglass...

With additional layers such as the green (or in our crowd, usually purple) solder mask, and additionally a silkscreen layer typically white that you are free to play with, you can you can look to these layers for pointers on how pep up your next PCB!

With fabrication houses often allowing you to — at a premium — choose the color of the mask and silkscreen inks used, you can build a somewhat limited palate of colors to work with, by selectively masking the different layers.

In some cases, simply spicing up the solder mask selection can be enough to give quite the visual impact — and along with some SVGs imported into the silkscreen layer, it can offer an eye catching combination of color.

There are some various scripts, or in most modern ECAD suites, built-in functions that will let you pull in vector, or even raster image data, to be rendered into the various layers of the PCB stack — so why stop at just SVGs on the silkscreen layer?

With a bit more effort, the reward for working designs into the solder mask and even copper layers, rather than just the silkscreen, can be absolutely stunning.

Allowing you to expose either the bare fiberglass substrate, or especially when working with gold plating — the extra color options enable some striking designs — as this beautiful example from Trammell Hudson demonstrates, showing off what can be achieved with the standard OSH Park stack up.

Or, an alternative route, is to pad print. If your design is sparse enough to allow for the far looser tolerances that the pad printing process brings.

We can see that the experiments listed with the pad printing process certainly produce eye popping results!

Although this method can be tooled up for production by yourself for less than a thousand bucks or so — it won't get you printing reliably on anything less than a scale of "abstract shapes."

It's going to struggle to co-exist with the SMD assembly process with the sort of fine pitch components we are all used to laying down. Things look like they could get messy, quite quickly on the QFN scale.

This PCB needs more RGB...

So occasionally, we see these colorful Arduino Leonardo clones popping up on Twitter, usually generating considerable discussion in accompanying thread as to how this board got to being so colorful.

With a design originating from a company calling themselves ElectroCookie, these folks certainly seem to know a thing or two about color-coated circuit boards!

While light on the details themselves, a little googling suggests that the method relies upon a process similar to that offered by a Shenzhen-based company; Makernet — who offer what is thought to be UV-curing ink-based inkjet printing system. Despite a few key words, the trail goes cold from there however.

Until now that is!

Looking like something straight out of a synthwave album cover, the silkscreen work on the CAMPZONE 2019 badge is something else, simply sublime.

No longer do we have to dither on how the process is put down, as it's been plainly put to us by Tom Clement, over at the documentation and blog page that hosts the 2019 badge project — and also where you can lay your hands on this hotness.

With enough to grok to get your laminate supplier up to speed on how to get your colors deposited in due course — again, always for a fee of course — we'll leave the technical writeup to Clement.

Suffice to say, this level of art does not come without sone commitment to the craft. There are still going to be a few back and forth between you and the supplier(s) in your tree, required to deliver the prefect product presentation.

It's still not a process that is quite down on the PCB pool levels of production — one can imagine a full technicolor panel of random depositions would quickly end up a brown mess — a mush of CMYK.

No, indeed, this is still a trick to bust out when you're done with prototyping. This is pre-production scale silkscreen specification. But oh my, do the results look simply spectacular.

For the sort of product that might forgo an enclosure, such as a PCB badge, this is a stunning trick to pull off, provided you can sink a base level cost of the setup. If you have even the reasonably small volumes seen here — a conference badge — it could be just what your next design needs to stand out from the crowd.