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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."
I might, and I'll be able to pretty soon, from the looks of things.
Could they in effect print or incorporate certain components inside the PCB board?
SMD resistors are pretty small, and if they were embedded it would free up more surface area for larger components and reduce overall size.
Meh, I make SMD boards simply with some copper clad board, a laser printer, and some home made etchant (cupric chloride). I either hand solder or use a hotplate with solder paste.
Takes about 30 minutes from printing the circuit to finished product. Costs about $1 not including the parts I solder on and I have a high quality physically small product.
Not impressed, my vacuum tubes were plenty good enough for adding and subtracting. They're cheaper than those new "transistors" too. I can put an array of tubes together for much cheaper than you can put transistors on a board.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
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.
Badly, almost certainly. Think of it as a poor man's wire-wrap system and make comparisons to that.
The conductive thread has a lot more resistance than real wire-wrap wire (I would have used wire-wrap wire with stripped ends instead of conductive thread for this reason alone). You don't get the gas-tight connections that you get where wire-wrap wire is pulled over the corner of a square post, so there's potential for long-term oxidation and increased resistance (to the point of appearing to be an open circuit at low voltages). Since the "wires" aren't insulated, stretching or sagging from any loss of tension runs the risk of shorting two connections. It's going to be even more prone to loosening from vibration and flexing than wire-wrap.
Any time you mention "solder", remember the temps involved and that the plastic structure used in the construction has to withstand those temperatures. Standard FR4 printed circuit board material (fiberglass reinforced, non-reversible heatset resin) is remarkably tough stuff. Even the most heat-resistant thermoplastics the industrial 3D printing suppliers are making available are questionable for standard soldering temperatures. And it's not clear that the hobbyist printers can produce the temperatures necessary to work with those higher-melting-point thermoplastics.