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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."
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.
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.