Laser soldering

Interesting (and seemingly dangerous?) laser soldering. They also demonstrate direct pcb making with a laser

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I wonder what the advantage of laser soldering would be. I’ll eventually get around to doing something similar to that PC board production video. It says they use vinyl film, though. Is that just being called the wrong thing? I thought vinyl was a no-no.

The edges of that mask looks really bad, if that’s not already a reason to steer clear of it.

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It’s much cleaner just to cut a vinyl mask on a vinyl cutter, and if you dont want to go that route, you can print the black mask on clear film and use PCB stock with a UV mask that you expose to light under the film.

Soldering? Well, I prefer to actually get projects done, and it takes about 2 seconds to solder a tinned wire into a PCB with a pencil iron. :slight_smile:

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Laser soldering is great when you use high temperature solder on an already populated board. If you have some components that can’t survive reflow temps, you can just locally solder the few parts to the board. It’s especially useful using an automated process.

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If you had your board in a CAD program, maybe you could use CNC to do unattended soldering. At some point that would be a time saver. It would have to be done without the scorching though.

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