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Hands-On With the Voltera V-One PCB Printer (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Eric Evenchick was one of the first backers of the Voltera V-One PCB Printer and just received the 6th device shipped so far. He ran it through its paces and published a review that gives it a positive rating. The hardware uses conductive ink to print traces on FR4 substrate. The board is then flipped upside down and the traces baked on the machine to make them robust. Next the printer dispenses solder paste and the same heating method is used to reflow after components are placed by hand.
This is a pretty cool concept and a good start, but like consumer 3D printers from five years ago, it is not really practical or cost effective. The biggest problem this thing has is the $2199 price tag. Holy crap! Anybody can already make better quality circuit boards using a cheap laser printer, a blacklight, and some basic supplies. You could even build a DLP projector-based photolithography setup with great resolution for half that price, and people have done so. It just doesn't cost anywhere near $2199 to make good circuit boards.
That brings us to the next big problem: this thing doesn't make good circuit boards. Conductive ink is not a real substitute for solid copper traces. The traditional etched-foil method ensures uniform and predictable trace properties, and the solid copper has great current carrying capacity and low resistance. That matters a lot in many applications. Good luck handling tens of amps (or even more) in a switching power supply using conductive ink for traces.
But then there are the holes. Or lack of holes. This thing doesn't drill holes, and it's intended to create boards with no holes at all. It makes "double layer" boards by overlapping insulated conductive traces applied on the same face of the substrate. That's clever and a very cool idea, but it's no substitute for drilled holes and two planes separated by the substrate itself. I would have very little confidence in wire attachments made to this type of board, and it definitely is not suitable for applications with any serious voltage differential between layers, or where impedance control or stray capacitance matters. In other words, it's limited to a small and low-performance set of applications. No multi-megahertz digital signals. No RF circuits. No high voltage (or even line-powered) stuff. No high current handling. For $2199, I'll wait a decade and see where this tech goes.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Interesting. Good work guys. But ot much use for anything but trivial boards without the ability to deal with vias.
Because PCB specs do matter, even when you know you're going to be reaching for the Dremel to drill the holes. They dictate what parts can and cannot be fitted, and whether a life-size prototype can be made. And whether you're going to have to do it all again in copper for the next phase.
See the comments section discussing the resistance of the trace. One of the developers commented the following:
The sheet resistance is 12 miliohms per square, at a height of 70um. You can find the specifications on our website.
As a rule of thumb, when using our printer you can expect a 12mil trace about 2 inches long should be about 1ohm.
So 1 ohm for a 12mil 2inch trace. Compare that to 0.04 ohm for the same on a standard circuit board and you end up with something that is effectively useless unless you're only working with small signals.
Won't bother then
3D printing came and went in the consumer market because it made no sense. Sure, there are some valid uses here and there but we're not entering a post-scarcity era of mankind here.
And if you don't believe me, how many people do you know that make their own clothes even though we've had consumer computerized sewing machines for 30 years now?
So now we need to move on to the next great big thing, because we no longer create or invent things, we merely move money around based on whims.