How-To: Print Circuit Layouts on Perfboard

The Monday Jolt is a new series about microcontrollers and electronics that appears in MAKE every Monday morning.

For today’s Jolt, I asked German hacker “Kopfkopfkopfaffe” to create a how-to on transferring both sides of a circuit design onto perfboard. Perf is great for creating a quick, robust test board for a circuit you’re prototyping, but with no set traces and no silkscreened circuit diagram, like an etched PCB, it can be hard to keep track of where your components go as you solder them. You can mark the board with a pen, but this can look messy and is prone to error. Kopfkopfkopfaffe uses the toner transfer method to deposit a print of his circuit directly onto the board, using an iron.

Check out his how-to in our Projects section to see how it’s done.