Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
Last night i did some test with the chemicals which is used to develop PCB. For test i used piece of copper plated PCB sheet around 2 inch, and drew a simple circuit from a water proof pen and this circuit will detect infrared signal. For that i used a surface mount(SMD) LM358. I used surface mount chip because i want to make the circuits compact than now. Even though i used a SMD chip i used normal 1/4 watt resistors in my circuit cause this time i did not order for the SMD resistors and stuffs. This was just a test for the chemicals that i have so the test is perfect. Chemicals are good to go for other developments. In my robo, the circuits will be surface mount ones. This week i will do some positives to burn from chemical. Then it will look like an original circuit.