I understand that they are printed but why only flat? Is there no way to give it a 90 degree angle.
In: Technology
Sure… but why?
If you had a printed PCB like an angle bracket, that would put stress on the corner making it more likely to fail than the rest of the board. If you needed to fit the electronics into an angle-bracket-like space, you could simply print two circuit boards, connect them with a ribbon cable and place them at the same angle.
An angle bracket PCB also couldn’t be placed in pick-and-place machines to populate it and would be a nuisance to populate even manually compared to a flat board.
If your PCB had more than two layers, it would be a nuisance to manufacture because you need special machines.
Why would they be anything else? If you need a board in any other shape or angle you just make another flat one and connect as many as you want with a ribbon cable or header pins.
You’ve seen a projector? That’s basically how PCBs are manufactured. They shine an image onto a light sensitive chemical, and the parts of the chemical that are left on the board don’t get etched away. The boards need to be flat for this, and are usually some specific size the manufacturer has standardized on. More complicated boards have multiple layers laminated together, and it’s going to be hard to clamp them together if it’s not flat when this is happening.
After the board is manufactured, you can attach them to each other at an angle, and you can print circuits on a flexible substrate.
A detail to consider may be that there’s no sound reason to have angles when the chips on them are all flat due to photo lithography and production methods that generate flat chips to be used on the boards. As others have mentioned; ribbon and other connectors can be used instead of more complicated pcb manufacturing.
You can do all kinds of bends with a flexible PCB. Those are often found inside compact and odd shaped devices, like [digital cameras](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Zdy2.jpg).
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