Fabricating Wooden Circuit Boards by Laser Beam Machining

Abstract

Laser cutting machines are commonly used in wood processing to cut and engrave wood. In this paper, we propose a method and workflow for producing various sensors and electrical circuits by partially carbonizing the wood surface with a laser cutting machine. Similar to wiring on a conventional printed circuit board (PCB), the carbonized part functions as a conductive electrical path. Several methods for creating small-scale graphene by using a raster-scanning laser beam have been proposed; however, raster-scanning requires a substantial amount of time to create a large circuit using carbon. This paper extends the method with a defocused vector-scanning CW laser beam and reduces the time and cost required for fabrication. The proposed method uses an affordable CW laser cutter to fabricate an electrical circuit including touch sensors, damage sensors, and load sensors on wood boards. The circuit can be easily connected to a common one-board microcontroller using metal screws and nails typically used in DIY woodworking.