@heatherhorns yes!! so the silvery parts here, are copper. there's two steps to having a silvery part like this. one is to have a copper layer underneath it (which i usually do for a ground plane, but i forgot it because this isn't conducting electricity)
the second is to mask the area from being painted over with the pcb color, which here is purple (the color is used to protect the printed circuits)
long (650 characters), rambling about circuit board finishes
@astra @heatherhorns Well, technically that's not copper but the HASL finish on top of copper! It'd be copper colored if you were looking at the actual copper
if you want it silvery you have to go with HASL (preferably lead-free) or immersion silver finish; you can also get gold by using ENIG, ENEPIG, or hard gold finish, or you can get it copper colored by using OSP finish (note however that immersion silver will tarnish over time, OSP will degrade and the underlying copper will oxidize, and HASL will go dull in time--that's one reason why most PCBs that do this use ENIG (the other reason is that ENIG is also the most popular finish))
-F
long (650 characters), rambling about circuit board finishes
@Felthry @heatherhorns yes this!! these are just prototypes so i'm going for jlc's finest, cheapest finish
but i'm me so also i get purple
@astra @heatherhorns ah, I suppose the final will use ENIG then? (hard gold would be more durable but probably not worth the expense)
it'd be kinda neat if you could selectively anodize some metal on a PCB to whatever color you want
-F
@Felthry @heatherhorns if i did a "final" yeah i would go for ENIG. but selective anodization would be amazing
@astra @heatherhorns i can think of some ways to do that but uh
is it possible to anodize nickel?
it's usually aluminum or stainless steel that gets anodized for those anodized metal products but neither of those can be deposited on a circuit board
i thought about the possibility of anodizing a 100% tin HASL but i'm not sure that would work because HASL isn't very flat
if you could get a PCB fab to do ENIG but skip the IG part you could get nickel on a board though
-F
@astra @heatherhorns it may be possible to anodize gold if you do it in an atmosphere of hydrogen chloride or possibly pure chlorine
that would be Very Impractical though
-F