Wire wrap

No one has mentioned an age old technique of autonomous wire wrapping.
This was a favored method of early prototyping circuits.
Same method can be applied here.
Pcb you would use is veroboard/stripboard or perfboard, all these options are really, really easy to get a hold of.

Debate and discuss?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2010 11:07PM by Grogyan.

Hi Grogyan,

... search through the forum with "all dates" set - then you'll find some discussions about ... most are 2 years and older ...

Will look into that.

Still i'm interested in hearing from everyone the pros and cons for such a system as a consideration for integrating replicatable electronics into the RepRap, which is based on the old technology of autonomous wire wrapping

I'm relatively new to these forums, though i've have known about RepRap since late 2007 (newspaper article)

... read through the linked posts and the poolHead" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">discussion in SpoolHead ...

I think it has potential. But how would we make the pegs?

Also, in traditional wire-wrapping, how is the wire fixed to the peg initially? Does it pass through a hole in the peg?

Just use typical 0.1" (2.54mm) header pins, some of these are designed for wire wrapping, if you can get them, otherwise regular header pins will work fine.

Downside of this tech is that everything will most likely be through hole instead of SMT.

Wire wrapping just uses a stripped end of #32 AWG Kynar sheathed wire, that is then threaded into a wire wrapping tool, place the tool over the header pin and give it a few turns.
Done, no solder, (other than placement of the header connectors), no fuss, easy to rework.

The talk about the Spool head, reminded me of autonomous wire wrapping machines, where as the link that VDX posted was more about wrapped enamel wire coated with flux which is then soldered, which is quite different from what I was thinking could be used.

... i think the best method would be laser-welding wires wuith a thin isolating coating to nailhead-pins previous inserted into the plastic sheet/PCB. The isolating cover could be burned away with the laser too ...

If using high power lasers (CO2, NdYAG or fiber-lasers) you can melt/fuse the wire-material itself, but with weaker diode-lasers you have to use some additive soldering or brazing material previously positioned on top of the nail-heads.

With weak lasers (not capable to evaporate/cut the wire) you need something mechanical to cut the wire after soldering (see the SpoolHead-wiki), or you have to feed a continuous cobweb and cut/remove not needed segments later manually ...

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Viktor
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