3D printers – Raccoon Lab shows how to turn a 3D printer into a fast PCB prototype maker: designing in KiCad, extruding thick traces to 2 mm, printing the board, then making it conductive with copper tape and cutting traces along the raised edges. The approach is “quick and
A couple of days might not sound like much—until you’re waiting on a prototype you can’t afford to hold back. That’s the pain point driving Raccoon Lab’s latest hack: using a 3D printer to produce fast, simple printed circuit boards without the slow turnaround.
The process starts the same way a lot of hobby PCB work begins. You take your idea, make a schematic, and lay it out in KiCad. From there, the workflow changes in a very specific way. To keep traces strong enough to work, the traces are made very thick before the board is exported.
The exported design then moves into 3D CAD software. Here, the thick traces get turned into actual physical “raised” structures: they’re extruded to 2 mm tall. Only after that do the files go to the printer.
Once the 3D-printed board comes out, the board still isn’t a circuit yet. The conductive layer is added by applying copper tape to the surface. After the copper is in place, traces are cut out along the raised edges where the extruded, 2 mm-tall traces sit.
The outcome is a “very quick and dirty PCB.” It’s not positioned as something production-ready. But for simple microcontroller projects, it’s presented as good enough—and, importantly, more accessible than milling a board with a CNC.
Raccoon Lab also points to a wider wave of similar variations on the same approach, including custom software designed to help streamline the steps.
For anyone who’s spent too long waiting for prototype boards, the appeal is obvious: the design-to-hardware path can be compressed hard enough to keep experiments moving. And with the copper-tape step, the final touch still lands in the realm of hobby-friendly materials.
3D printing printed circuit boards PCB prototyping KiCad copper tape microcontroller projects Raccoon Lab CAD CNC milling