pcb 3d printer and the future of homebrew systems like the pyra


Funny enough DragonFly was the early name of the Pyra, most of the early circuit designs refer to it as the DragonFly.

This is pretty cool, hope it's real, also not sure if it can handle things as tight as the CPU boards.
 
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I wouldn't like to try doing the CPU board with their 'highly conductive' (i.e. significantly resistive) traces. Maybe the peripheral board would support such tolerances, but I wouldn't try the CPU board until you can at least get that working.
 
I can see this sort of thing being attractive to hobbyists as an alternative to tea-trays full of ferric chloride - but the Pyra's CPU board is working right at the limit of conventional PCB construction, and there is absolutely no way that these inks are going to be as conductive as solid copper.

It's still a neat idea though, and I'd love to see it come to market.
 
@Binky - From what I understand from reading that, it seems it's not limited to the crappy conductive ink, it can also do inkjet transfer and curing, meaning real copper cladded boards.

Okay re-read, it's not what it's implying... It's just the crappy inks.
 
This reminds me about an old April's fool related to Emule (...maybe 2004/2005) where a supposed circuit printer could have been attached to emule to download/print open sourced circuits shared by users...

(I can't find it on the internet :( that was the worst time for file-sharing networks...)
 
I would like one of these for making small projects. Unfortunately, I'm sure it will be prohibitively expensive for hobbyists.
 
The future will rather be having kind of an primordial ooze for electronics in a bowl with a swarm of nano-bots building whatever you tell them to. PCBs made up of 2-dimensional layers and placing separately manufactured ICs on those will be so yesterday. *muahaha*
 
"Multi-layer" is mentioned; any details?

See, I've often thought about making a simple CNC machine; I started a heavy duty CNC machine, but didn't do my research on the amount of stress, and it bent itself all to shit :) (Also, CNC of metal and wood makes a _serious_ mess, and I didn't want to have a big vacuum mounted onto it..); I did make a 3d printer (same design, just additive instead of subtractive) which does the job. But turning the 3d printer (just an x-y-z table really) into a etcher isn't so bad.. like, cnc with a lightweight drill on it (like a Dremel even), can edge pcbs just fine theoretically; theres lots of people doing similar.

Problem always was.. i) lining up two sided pcb, and ii) via's and iii) solder mask/resist.

If you can do multiple layers (such as draw one layer of traces down, and then add a layer of epoxy or something, and then draw another layer on top), thats pretty neat; the trick again is always the vias. (and if you're just rendering layer on top of layer, I'd worry about resilience; its really really annoying if you hand solder up a board and check back a few months later, or after a winter, and the board doesn't work; a PCB doesnm't usually have that problem, but if you hand solder up a perfboard, it often does.)

So, I'm very curious about how all this pans out .. it would be outstanding to save on time and costs and just knock out a pcb; but with the use case so far, its just not worth bath-tub acid etching or cnc carving etchign for at least the projects I do. (I also tend to use a fair amount of surface mount parts, and the pitch between pins, without solder resist, is just not really workable with home cnc etching, or soldering.)

ie: If you just want to knock out a little amplifier or power supply board, you can do it with a sharpie marker and chemicals; but if you want to make somethig liek an arduino (which is _really_ trivial by the way, theres barely anything going on there), the part costs get annoying unless you're using some surface mount microcontrollers .. and even the larger pin pitches get annoying fast, without a nice solder mask, or a good CNC etch, .. you can photo resist etch it, but the solder mask is soooooo handy.

But maybe you can print out the solder mask too, if accurate enough.. but that pin pitch..

Someone will nail this down, soon, and it'll be glorious. But maybe not affordable for the home, due to the accuracy needed..

jeff
 
PCB prototyping services are pretty cheap and quick nowadays , this sort of printer would have to be fairly inexpensive to be worth it.... unless you are the impatient type and cant wait a week for your boards..
 
Down at a student lab at my university, we have a PCB mill. It'll to .5mm pitch footprints, vias to some extent, and reasonably aligned two layer board, and it'll do drilling. If you're just making a simple board, you can have a turn-around time of less than an hour. It's pretty great.
 
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