Project Goals
What do we aim to achieve?
What we are trying to build
Our goal is to create a user-friendly, plug-and-play 2-layer rapid pcb prototyping for office use. Our ideal machine will be as simple to use as a 3D printer - just load the material, press go, and return for your finished PCB.
Doesn’t this already exist?
Yes and No. While there are many wonderful rapid prototyping solutions for PCBs, none of them quite check all of the boxes we would expect out of our ideal solution. While many existing products can produce great results, we aim to create a true ‘set it and forget it’ solution, and we haven’t quite seen anything like this yet.
What we plan to do differently
Many current market solutions require a great deal of attention from the user, which greatly reduces the usefulness of the machines in our opinion. Things like drill bit changes, board flipping, and manual via installation may be trivial tasks, but the time they require of the user adds up and can take away valuable time that would have been better spent creating different designs. This is what we aim to do better. Our current prototype will have no manual interactions aside from at the start and end of the process - when you load and unload your material. That means no need for drill bit changes, manual via installation, or other babysitting of the machine in any form.
Avoiding obscure/proprietary consumables
This was another primary design goal of ours. Many machines we have seen require obscure or proprietary consumables, which are sometimes sold at high markups because of this fact. This is not unique to PCB prototyping, it is seen in 3D printing and many other tools. From the beginning we based our design around the use of common materials, so it will only require copper-clad FR4 and bare copper wire.
Prototype vs future iterations
The prototype we are working on currently is mainly designed to showcase our novel via prototyping process. As such many aspects of the machine in it’s current form were designed to simplify design rather than to be practical for a commercial product. Any future iterations of the machine will likely use a similar workflow for producing traces and via on a fresh board, however many aspects will likely be changed to optimize for things like build volume, reliability, and cost.
Noise, Mess, Smell
One thing that we do aim to tacke with this prototype is the issue of noise, mess, and smell. Obviously for a machine meant to be used in an office environment, these things are undesirable. Because of this, even in our prototype, we specifically designed our process and part selection around these considerations to make this a machine that could be used in almost any environment.