Electronics in printed objects: 'Tunnels for wires'?

Has anyone tried printing a piece with 'tunnels' through it, in which you run wires?(manually) The wires can then stick out a bit for soldering stuff onto it, and the elements are basically held in place by their solder.

It will be quite some time until i can try it myself, so i thought i'd throw it here. Any suggestions/expectations/previous work? For instance, could a wire get stuck while trying to run the wire through or something? Also, the components might just be hanging from the solder without some other action. (For instance, clamping the electronics between two printed parts.)

In the attachment is a vague idea of 'tunneling primitives' for openscad. You `difference` these with a 3d model you want the wires to go through. Just a `module` with two positions, a depth to go to, and a tunnel width as arguments. It is rather imperfect, as it flattens the tunnel at places.

For anyone trying to circular extrude ovals instead of circles at a different distance.. And rescaling. There is no solution for that problem. It might work if we can use 'the fourth components of transformation matrices'..

I actually did this for a project not too long ago. I made a Li-Po battery charger using a couple of variable linear regulators to regulate current and voltage. The whole thing, including resistors and capacitors, sit in a printed plastic block with holes to run the wires through. The result is a clean circuit without using a circuit board. Soldering the thing together is tougher than using a PCB, but easier than trying to free-form the circuit.

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... read the discussion-tab of 'Spoolhead' - [reprap.org]

There we had some talks related to embedding wires in printed parts ...

I've built some years ago complex micro-sensors from prefabbed green ceramic sheets (structured, partially gold-coated, laminated and fused to modules), which I've put into housings and connected the external pins by feeding gold-wires between the prefabbed pads and brazed them with a selfmade paste and diode-laser-head.

You can see a part of this sensor with connected micro-wires here, under "Usage->'-brazing/hard soldering' " - [reprap.org]: [reprap.org]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2012 03:11AM by VDX.

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Interesting, looks pretty promising imho. Cant see much on that image of the 'complex micro sensor', i dont know what you mean by that.(I'll read more later)

... here is an image comparing this 'micro-sensor' with a matchstick head - the inner 10 micron-wire is visible, the two 1 micron-wires are undersized for the resolution ... you can see them in the detail image in the previous link:



The part is laminated from 4 layers of 'green' ceramic, partially coated with gold layers and pads and some throughput-vias ... then sintered to the stable final structure ... and last soldered/fused the micro-wires on the top pads ...

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Yes I tried it once and believe it or not it was successful you also try to do the smae thing as I did.

... what exactly?

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]