Keyword: circuit board, circuit boards, PCB, circuit board prints
Some Kickstarter projects to circuit board design and sell the gadgets of the future really catch the imagination. So far, Australian tech outfit Cartesians campaign has raked in circuit board more than four times its stated goal of $30,000, still with two weeks to go.
What do they want to produce? A 3D printer that circuit board prints circuitry for another 3D printer, and another, and another. Cartesians EX¹ takes design schematics and prints silver onto a substrate to make a new, albeit rough, circuit board. Sometimes this can be done in just about an hour.
To the uninitiated, 3D printings benefits are still abstract how much value is there, really, in being able to print circuit board off another garden gnome. 3D printers have taken hold of the imagination of tinkers and hackers, but have yet to noticeably alter our day to day. In late 2011 some experts (and those with vested interests) predicted that with the way cheap substrates and design software were evolving, wed have 3D printed circuit boards in two years circuit board.
At an industrial scale circuit board have been printed for decades, via a variety of techniques. But that technology hasnt trickled down to those that dont actually need a thousand circuit boards at a time or cant wait for the longer turnarounds from a third party or are simply without big budgets circuit board.
Were hoping that the EX¹ will be the standard way that small to medium engineering companies prototype their electronic gadgets, notes co-founder Ariel Briner. circuit board He goes further by hoping teachers will use it to tutor students about electronics. The group also shows off the EX¹ by printing off a crude replica of a video game controller and putting it to use.
It is important to call timeout here and note circuit board Cartesian is not printing microprocessors, or resistors and capacitors. If a circuit board is the interstate system of a computer, microprocessors are something like the cars and passengers. Building those staggeringly complicated little brains with what amounts to a refined ink jet is still a long way off.
And while prototyping is an important part of research and development, Cartesian, like most 3D printer makers, seems to have a circuit board ways to go before its printers are churning out production grade products. Also, to acknowledge the circuit board semantics, Cartesians printer only operates in two dimensions as it lays down the silver the 3D aspect of it is really more the idea that its churning out a physical good rather than a term paper.
Even still, technological evolutions move in small increments and this is a notable one. Previously this process had often circuit board been done via the time consuming process of etching. Consumers and those small engineering companies will still have to wait until some circuit board time next year to get their hands on the EX¹. At that point, we can judge it for ourselves.
