Home Brew Through Hole Plating tips needed

[originator]

Too many vias! Over 500 vias, plus the 30+ chips on a double sided board. Fortunately I have a machine to drill it in under 15 minutes very easily. Running wires through the vias is not fun. I am looking for ideas to "presensitize" the holes, then do some home brew bath for tin (copper, etc) plating. There will be a number of revisions, so board houses would take too long. One easy way out for the vias at least is silver epoxy which conducts very well, but not sure on its shelf life.

Anybody done this before for prototypes?

 

[itsmoked]

Carrier current is certainly worth a look!

Rich you are thinking the X10 protocol. Which works pretty dang well and would probably work in a large hotel, which I see as Originator's toughest nut to crack.

I would wonder about the lighting controls though, now that I think about it. A lot of commercial buildings use (I think) carrier current to control e v r y t h i n g and an X10 probably wouldn't coexist with it. (not sure)

BTW Microchip has free stacks for Ethernet/TCPIP that work quite well now.

I would probably use one PIC for everything but the Ethernet and another for the Ethernet, and then interconnect them with the internal SPI ports(which works very well). That way the programming tasks stay separate and Ethernet becomes a changeable "plug-in" option.

The plug-in option would also allow X10 for here, Eithernet for the next place, BlueTooth the next, Zigby the next, USB, and NextYearsProtocol, without changing or infecting er.. affecting the core door functionality.

Keith Cress
Flamin Systems, Inc.-

http://www.flaminsystems.com