CFM project log ... aka. yet another boring technical post

writing these things help do some mental housekeeping and keep the heart at ease...

sometimes you spend a long time working on something, and the real breakthrough turns out not to be the product obtained from all that effort. It is actually the renunciation of something major that signifies the real breakthrough.

This was the case for the 'development' (this is such a marketing word...creates irrational hype...but i can't think of another more appropriate one) of the zapping erasing (verb: zaperase. ) tools. One of the tools planned for was to be a very fine metal tip. this was meant to outline the circuit traces. this isolates the traces electrically. thereafter we'd use something more blunt to erase the rest of the metal. hmm its getting hard to explain without first discussing the method, but i shan't do it here.

basically, it could have been convenient to have such a fine tip zaperaser. but technical issues abound, as is always the case. the fine tip is prone to melting from the high temperature of the spark, and turns blunt very quickly, in a matter of a few zaps. and to make a line, its necessary to drag the tip along. compare this to another tool that was planned for and eventually realised, called the 'instant line' tool. Its actually one segment of a regular penknife blade, and placing the nascent circuit board in contact with the blade's cutting edge causes a line to be burnt instantly. that's why the instant line tool can last for many many zaps. If it gets blunt, we can sharpen it for a while, and its just one segment of a blade, of a set of several blades easily purchased from a bookshop.

besides, most traces are made of straight lines. i don't worry abt round component pads, for they will still be fabricated as rectangles. in the case of curves, we can spline it. if a single blade is too wide to spline with ease, its possible to sand away some portion of the cutting edge so a recess appears, then insulate it.

Hence i am done with the development of the zaperasing tools.

That leaves me with the last of the 3 nitty gritty issues for this project, as outlined in my notebook. that is, component mounting. i've resolved that all components will be individually mechanically clamped onto the circuit, which is just aluminium foil stuck on regular transparency. some components of similar height can be clamped together too.

just need to look for a good clamp material, and clamp fastening materials...

just one more hurdle to go...