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3D-Printed Circuit Boards, For Solder-Free Printable Electronics
An anonymous reader writes "Check out the latest success of the OpenSCAD 3d-printed electronics library. To use it, you just need a 3D printer and some conductive thread. OpenSCAD generates a component holder, and conductive thread wraps it all together — no solder, no etching chemicals, no sending out for anything. The instructable takes you through all the steps from schematic to circuit, and includes a more useful example: the fully printed LED flashlight."
It would have been nice to see it without having a full-screen pop-up ad telling me to subscribe to instructables whenever I click on a link.
It's chunky, but this is clearly the beginning of something. Anyone know anything about how this system ages and/or wears?
There HAS to be some way to exploit this method in a way you cannot do with traditional PCB making methods.
I might, and I'll be able to pretty soon, from the looks of things.
But I'll pass until it can print BGA's. Seriously, for the complexity it can do now a breadboard is better suited.
So instead of using that icky earth destroying copper wire, it uses conductive thread. Thread is used by girls making craft projects, what an excellent correlation with the marketing campaign that only women like health and green (seriously, WTF is up with that?). Tada, conductive thread, its great!
Seriously, conductive thread is basically wire wrapping wire with yarn/thread except the connections aren't gas tight so its not as reliable. Wirewrap is great stuff, I built a 8051 based microcontroller in '91 and it still works. Its a 8052AH-BASIC which is basically a preprogrammed 8051, predating the identical concept BASIC-STAMP and more modern ARDUINO by a decade or two. Wire wrap is the opposite of automotive/industrial/aerospace grade as it is completely intolerant of vibration and moisture. Aside from that, its great. I would guess conductive thread would be the same.
Reading the articles, its a cool psuedo Manhattan style construction using little pegs and making the electrical contacts using the psuedo wirewrap thread. I like manhattan construction for experimental stuff... need another connection point? snap off a tiny piece of DS PCB and solder it to the groundplane...
Simplest similar design would be a 3-d printer that can print Kapton filament and regular ole solder paste and a hot air gun. One problem being that a lot of repraps use Kapton for their high temp parts, so you'd need something more exotic. Aside from my having no idea if Kapton is thermo-setting or thermo-plastic and being too lazy to look it up because it ain't happening anytime soon.
If you don't want to use conductive thread, silver bearing epoxy would probably work.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Not impressed. I can hand solder a circuit smaller and much cheaper on standard proto board with plated through holes. Done this many times with better results. For circuits I am going to make more than 1 or 2 of just download the free ExpressPCB program and for around $55 you can three boards.
But it will probably never work for real products. I'd never have the gall to sell an electronic product with connections made of conductive thread. I'd sooner hand-wire it together on perf board.
3D printing works if you need to make one or five objects that don't need to be very robust. But you don't have to get into very high numbers at all before it's cheaper get injection-molded custom parts that are much stronger.
You are obviously too young to remember vacuum tubes. I have been working in electronics since the early 70's as a kid, tv shops in the mid-late 70's. I have watched circuits shrink over the years, from no circuit board (point wired tv chassis), to huge printed circuit board, to the switch over from tubes to transistors (and the RCA nuvistor), then onto LSI chips. A 25" color TV use to take two strong men to lift & move around. Now, a housewife can hang one on a wall. Given time, the 3d printing will shrink also.
If you can change 'ink' in the process of 'printing', just change it to a carbon based 'ink', then you can print more traditional traces. Then if you print more of your inert substrate over it, its even 'sealed' from the elements.
( and i know its not ink, i'm just sticking with the analogy of a printer )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Can it be used by manufacturing to make a quality product?
This is how things were made when most of the readers on the site were not yet born. Nothing new here folds. Just check out the Wikipedia article on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap#Automated_wire_wrapping
HTFU
So now we're using 3D printers to make things that are already printed in real life?
Next week, a 3D-printed book. No ink, kids! Just delicious ABS plastic pages with the letters raised from the surface.
All told, this works quite well as a parable for why the benefits of 3D printing will not lead to everyone manufacturing all their own consumer products at home, nor will manufacturers be replacing any substantial volume of their processes with 3D printing.
Have a nice writing
Actually even small quality injection molds can easily run into the multiple thousands of dollars, so while you're correct for commercial runs, for pretty much anything below that, i.e. most non-commercial parts, 3D printing is starting to look good, especially on the more robust commercial processes.
I'll grant you the strength issue - I think it'll be a while before 3D printers become competitive in that realm, though milling machines don't have that issue. The architectural school of "mass customization" is beginning to take advantage of this - it's no longer dramatically more expensive to cut custom parts from base stock than it is to cut standardized parts - it's all computer controlled and comes down to how long the cuts are and how much material is wasted do to poor component packing on the stock. Especially if a structure can be built from multiples of only a few custom pieces it can rapidly be built by a few people given a big pile of parts and lego-style assembly instructions, offsetting the higher component cost with lower assembly costs (fewer, and potentially less-skilled, man hours required)
At this point 3D printing is largely a hobbyist and prototyping tool, as is to be expected. After all it's only just starting to become affordable, and people are still exploring its potential. A few decades ago computers were in a similar sort of niche, relegated to hobbyists and research institutions. The 3D printing techniques that are being developed now are sort of the equivalent to the development of the bubble sort - poor performance, but it gets the job done, and thus expands the sphere of what's possible, allowing more hobbyists to explore a wider range of possible applications.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Okay, I'm sorry to say that from a glance at the TFA it looks like they're talking about installing the thread by hand, but if that part is automated it could open up new doors outside of electronics as well.
For example - when building up a structural component what if you lay down a "net" of polyester thread between layers - you could potentially get a dramatic increase in the strength and durability of the finished part, especially if you carefully aligned the thread to maximize it's impact.
Or, if doing true 3D construction we could do things like wrapping a form in a cocoon of thread and binder to form an immensely strong structure. I envision printing a layered form out of frosting or some other temporary substrate, which is then cocooned using large open spirals of thread so that it takes dozens of layers before the form is hidden and any given area has lots of large-angle thread intersections where forces can be distributed between layers rather than forming easily cracked seams where the thread is all aligned in the same direction. The same basic hardware could work with anything from cheap polyester thread to carbon fiber, depending on the cost/strength ratio best suited to the application.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm surprised at how much hate and vitriol are being spewed here on slashdot. To the point of throwing around "geek" as an insult regarding this stuff. 3D printing is in its infancy, it's useful for rapid prototyping of things. Sure it has its drawbacks and limitations, but some of us are hackers (in the original sense of the term, not the MSM version) and tinkerers.
Sure, a lot of things on www.thingiverse.com (a repository for DIYers and digital objects) are just _more_ parts for _more_ 3D printers, but there is some useful stuff there too. This is just someones attempt at making the spectrum for 3D printers broader and more useful. All this hate is honestly pretty low of the slashdot community.
With some commercial STL machines (not the amateur ones) you can lay down multiple materials with different properties. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford has done this for some flexible robot parts. He's trying for biological-like structures, where everything is flexible but still highly structured.
... they are flattered that we are trying to imitate their technology.
Back before we really understood pcb technology and clock speeds were low, automated wire wrap was a viable technology. For a few years that was THE way to make a computer backplane. The technology had some surprising advantages. One, that wasn't obvious, was that the equipment was robust in a heavy vibration environment.
We could do conductive thread (or thin wire) but not using wire wrap. Mark Tilden showed that connections can be done using silver based ink (the stuff used for repairing rear window defoggers). The machine could lay the wires, tack them in place and then squirt some conductive ink on the connections. Once those were dry, it could then cover everything with plastic.
Just because the first iteration of something looks like a kludge, it doesn't mean that it won't eventually become viable. Remember that the first iteration of printed circuits was an attempt to literally print the circuits (rather than etching them).
I'm curious. How does a post like the above that politely points out to an "old fart" that an old fart should just let the slashdotters play in their sandbox and learn for themselves get modded "-1"?
Are only petulant children and touchy old farts modding the new-age slashdot?
cant wait.
really want it to reach a point where hard modding consumer electronics isnt so elementary, but is rather a robust reworking of their innards via personal fabrication.
theres a fair number of people who still cling to very specific CRTs (the 16:10 sony gdm-fw900, for example)... how lovely itd be to go a bit full-retard and turn that 24" 100+ lbs 2304x1440 beast into a 30" ~200 lbs 4k monster.
One type of prototyping PCB machine uses a 3-axis mill to cut traces into plain copper-clad boards. Got that - a 3 axis mill. All the rep-raps and such are already 3-axis machines. They just need a mill option to cut circuit boards. Not everything needs to be "additive" manufacturing. Also, once you have a mill you can cut sheet metal. That means you can now make motors (rotor and stator laminations) sans shaft. You can also cut wood or metal shapes accurately to build structures. This would go a looooong way toward self-replication. But hey, if you insist on extruding goo for *everything* it's going to be decades before you make more than plastic toys.
Should have purged the machine and made a final pass with conductive resin loaded in the machine. Then the machine could have printed the circuit traces on the surface of the part. For what it's worth, this is reminiscent of old Radio Shack kits.