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Hands-On With the Voltera V-One PCB Printer (hackaday.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the for-when-your-toaster-needs-a-remote-control dept.

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.

7 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Awful lot of money for some big flaws... by mpoulton · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Awful lot of money for some big flaws... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      Or use a $600 CNC router to mill and drill a PCB.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na9-USi_hZQ

    2. Re:Awful lot of money for some big flaws... by Cthefuture · · Score: 4, Informative

      I use a laser printer, print on glossy magazine paper, put the paper toner-side-down on the PCB, run it through a high temp laminator, peal off the paper in soapy water, then etch. Takes almost no time and I can get very near professional results. I can do extremely tight small traces no problem.

      I have never tried a double-sided board but I bet I could do it by simply printing the circuit such that the paper could be folded over the PCB then the laminator would stick both sides. Probably be difficult to do but not impossible.

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    3. Re:Awful lot of money for some big flaws... by WalrusSlayer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Full Disclosure: I'm a backer, though not early enough to get an early-bird unit.

      I look forward to trying this tech when I finally get mine. I have lots of reservations, but am still happy with my decision. I'm glad they seem to have found a way to paste/reflow boards that are inked. During the Kickstarter is was going to either be able to lay down ink, or paste/reflow. I.e., you could only paste/reflow a traditionally fabbed copper board, not a prototyped ink board that was fabbed by the Voltera. That was a pretty serious limitation, making the unit somewhat bipolar: you could quickly prototype boards in ink but then had to deal with soldering yourself. Once you were more confident with the design to send out for traditional copper boards, it became a nice alternative to stencils and ovens

      I can't speak to the resistance issue, but in my mind the other huge limiter is the feature resolution limit. Sure, there's a bunch of things you can prototype within the limits of the Voltera, but you don't have to move much beyond Arduino-class designs to bump against the ceiling. Things like the Intel Edison connector is way out of reach for this thing, and even a DIMM connector (think Raspberry Pi Compute Module) is too dense. They will have some breakout boards for common footprints that are too tight, but that's a half-measure in my book and only adds to the number of things that have to get redesigned on the path from a Voltera prototype to a real board.

      In the meantime I went ahead and bought an OtherMill, which can handle much smaller feature sizes, and uses traditional copper-clad boards. You have to connect your own vias, but it will at least drill them for you. And getting the alignment between both sides of the board can be tricky. But I've already done some interesting prototypes with that board, including stencils, and now have a toaster-oven-based reflow box. Had I known about the OtherMill I may not have sprung for the Voltera. Hopefully they complement each other---even if the Voltera becomes mostly a solder dispenser that's a win over what I'm dealing with now.

    4. Re:Awful lot of money for some big flaws... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 2

      I'm sorry, the copper is 5mm thick???

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  2. High resistance by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:High resistance by residents_parking · · Score: 2

      Depends. This is a well known issue with printed tracks. For power tracks yes there could be an issue. That's not to say there aren't workarounds eg manual reinforcing on critical nets. (I even saw that on a 4oz copper board used in a vehicle - busbars bolted to the thing!)

      But for signal tracks I don't think a few ohms is going to make much odds, might even be useful.