ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi lotus49,
yes print on the smooth side using a laser printer, the toner will stay in place until heated with a household iron and when sufficiently heated will 'melt' and transfer to the cleaned and prepared copper of the PCB.
The are plenty of tutorials on this subject. I have found that baking paper and gloss photo print paper are two the best mediums for transfer.
I can attach the track layout and silk screen mask as separate files if desired, the photo in the previous post was just an example.

Thanks for enquiring

I have seen tutorials for doing this but photo paper is quite expensive and many other sorts of paper don't seem to transfer the toner very well. I haven't made a PCB since I was doing my electronics AS level many years ago and that was before laser printers even existed. I used a marker pen to draw the tracks on. It worked but it wasn't very pretty and that bothered me then and it would bother me now.

Thank you for your reply.

Would be nice seeing as how you went through the trial and error if you could contribute a guide of your own on how to do this step by step with pictures while it is a nice guide different results may be had by different brands of printers, paper, masking etc.... So it would be nice to see a guide with pictures of each step that you go through and the materials as well as tools that you use.

I know this may sound a bit like work to do but it would be an excellent addition I believe if you are willing obviously you have had success where others have failed so it may be these slight details where people are missing out or hung up on.

Thanks for sharing way cool have never yet done this I recall doing plates for a printing press in the darkroom back in highschool some 20 years ago or so but haven't had the pleasure of fabing my own pcb's which would like be a very useful ability to have every other thing that I have read uses some crazy chemicals etc...

I guess the easy way out would be to share the link of the best guide to follow but I'd prefer to see your personal take on it as the esp8266 crowd seems to be a resourceful bunch.

I'm sorry that I didn't have time to do a tutorial, it would have been very useful though after my attempts and minor successes I opted for a fabricated PCB by a British company called "Ragworm". Attached is the finished board running code as I type. It only cost £2.65 so 'pretty good for a prototype'.
Thanks for your interest, I hope to share more as I discover new things.