Exposing Photopolymer Laminated Copper Clad Boards With A Peachy

[BumpingSpheda]

Hey guys. Throwing this out there, no idea if it's been discussed before, or to what length. Bit of a noob in these waters so looking forward to hearing what you all have to say.

Using consumer grade piezo printers and conductive inks to "print" conductive circuits has been the "holy grail" of quickly prototyping circuit boards. Others have tried using solid ink printers to print the etch resist directly onto the board, while even others have tried using pigment inks and higher end Epson printers with a similar idea in mind (curing process for the pigment ink required to evaporate water and "solidify" pigment, two print layers also sometimes required, but you're still printing the etch resist directly onto the board). If you laminated your Copper clad board with a photopolymer film (such as PurEtch from CapeFearPress), could you not lay the board at the bottom of your printing reservoir, input the z-axis height manually into the Peachy software (the height of the board) and have the UV laser draw/expose your artwork onto/into the photopolymer?

Could you also "print" an adhesive backed, Copper clad flexible film into a variable z-axis "step" reading device to read the z-axis? Have a continuous vertical trace that's ground which is separated by a gap from a bunch of tiny "horizontal" traces that run into some type of digital reader. As the the salt water rises it closes the gap and depending on the water's height it sends a different signal to the reader which in turn would digest that input as a specific tone/frequency that gets sent to the mic input. No idea what kind of resolution could be achieve via this route, and the Copper would have to be tinned, I'm assuming, to prevent corrosion. I'm guessing the traces would have to be very fine to achieve high z-axis resolution, but figured I'd throw that one out there in the open, too, in case anyone can run away with it.