Printed circuit boards can be square, round, octagonal, or whatever shape you desire. But there’s little choice when it comes to the third dimension: most PCBs are flat and rigid. Sure, you can make flexible PCBs like the kapton-backed ones you find inside electronic gadgets, but those are complicated to work with. As it turns out however, you can also make flexible boards using regular PCB material: check out [Rehana Al-Soltane]’s Flexible Crown PCB, a project she did as part of [Neil Gershenfeld]’s “How To Make (Almost) Anything” class at MIT.
The basic idea is to create flexures in the PCB by milling out several long slots with thin pieces connecting the two sides. [Rehana] got this idea from [Quentin Bolsée]’s flexible capacitive sensor project and applied it to make a crown-shaped PCB with sparkly LEDs. The crown can bend through 180 degrees and can actually be worn as a head ornament, with pin headers to clamp it down on the wearer’s hair.
[Rehana] used a tool called svg-pcb to design the board. This is an open source toolkit that lets you design PCBs by describing them in code, rather than drawing shapes by hand. Although this might look a bit odd if you’re used to working with traditional PCB design software, it’s ideal for making repetitive structures like the flexures in the crown: simply write a for loop and let the tool generate a perfect array of identical slots.
Fabricating the Flexible Crown posed a few difficulties of its own, because the PCB began to flex and wiggle itself loose before the milling process was finished. As it turned out, the trick was to cut all the slots on the interior first and only mill the board’s outline as the very last step.
Adding flexures to a PCB like this looks like a promising technique and we’ll keep an eye on further developments in this field. There are other ways of making bendy boards though: researchers at the University of Maryland used a laser engraver to make foldable PCBs. Our 2019 Flexible PCB Contest also yielded several impressive implementations.
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