Hand-Drawn and Inkjet Printed Circuits for the Masses (Video)

We started looking at ways to make instant hand-drawn or inkjet-printed circuit boards because Timothy met an engaging young man named Yuki Nishida at SXSW. Yuki is a co-founder of AgIC, a company that makes conductive ink pens and supplies special paper you can use to write or draw circuits or, if you have the right model of Brother printer, to print them with special inkjet inks. The AgIC people are aggressively putting the 'A' in STEAM by marketing their products to artists and craftspeople. Indeed the second line on their website's home page says, 'AgIC offers handy tools to light up your own art works.' This is an excellent niche, and now that AgIC has developed a circuit eraser (due to ship this April), it may lead to all kinds of creative designs. And as is typical with this kind of company these days, AgIC has been (at least partly) crowdfunded.

A little cursory Google searching will soon lead you to other companies selling into the home/prototype circuit board market, including Cartesian Co and their Argentum 3-D printer that does prototype and short-run PCBs and only costs $899 (on special at the time this was written) and Electroninks, which markets the Circuit Scribe pen and associated materials with an emphasis on education. There are others in this growing field, and a year from now there will probably be more of them, all working to replace the venerable breadboard the same way electronic calculators replaced slide rules.

Comments

The breadboard isn't going away anytime soon...

[mlts]

The nice thing about the breadboard is that you can work on one project, and either keep it, or yank the components off and put something different.

Even a short run device that allows one-off PCBs means that if stuff needs modified, the PCB needs to be tossed and a new one made.

I would give this device a place in the lab, but for the original product development, the breadboard will still be king. However, for testing an appliance, being able to one-off custom PCBs... especially multilayered ones... is quite useful.

Trace resistance

[thegarbz]

One of the biggest problems with these systems is the trace resistance. Silver ink has in every case so far been orders of magnitude higher in resistance than a small copper trace effectively making these systems useless for anything that carries power. I'm not talking about big power either, simply powering several micros, a few logic chips and a couple of relays on a circuit is enough to bring the current up that you can't just run everything in the same trace.

I predict lots of people will set fire to their projects.

Re:We aready have this

[pz]

Given today's bent towards surface mount, which comes with a whole new garage full of expensive equipment to really do the right way, it is just better to send your boards out to a third party to be etched, drilled, stuffed and soldered.

We've been doing some prototyping in my lab. I've been trained on old-school point-to-point prototypes. They work very well, are usually pretty good models for actual performance, and when its all said and done, take just about as much time as anything else.

My employee, a younger fellow, built a prototype with a breadboard. Egad, I remember those from undergraduate years, and how much I hated them. I spent more time debugging that mess of wires than it would have taken to build it point-to-point from the start.

Except that now everything is surface mount. We were getting ready to buy a rework station. And build one of those hotplate / toaster oven processing things. Then, I found a couple of videos showing people soldering SMT devices with a hand-held iron just fine thankyouverymuch. And, you know, it works great. The key is a steady hand (which I have, even though my assistant does not) and -- critically -- a stereo microscope. Assembling boards can be done pretty fast. In ways, it's faster than through-hole, and heaps less frustrating 'cause you don't need to keep flipping the board back and forth all the time.

The best part is that it's become ridiculously inexpensive to get PCBs made of medium size, with free (as in beer), or nearly free, tools that are really pretty good (and I've used the $25K/seat stuff, too). I've got three full-custom PCBs in front of me that, other than the ECOs from being prototypes, are professional grade. While they weren't free, they were affordable, and much more so than, say, 10 years ago.

So who needs one of these print-you-own circuits? Not me. Or a setup to etch boards myself? No thank you, I'll stay clear of those chemicals. I'm much happier spending a little more to have my boards come back perfect, with real vias, and even four layers if I want! But a garage full of specialized equipment? Nope. Just the old bench, iron, solder, wick, flux, with the addition of a microscope.