Show me your PCB printer

[Mac Walker]

Just kidding, they don't exist yet.  But it looks like we are getting closer, ha ha...

http://edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4432731/Desktop-PCB-factory-lets-you-design--print-and-assemble-your-designs-in-30-minutes-

[peps1]

There are a few company working on PCB printers, but a Australian company has already brought one to market after thire kickstarter took off.

http://www.cartesianco.com/the-argentum/  $1,599.00 

skip to 2.20ish

[Mac Walker]

Missed that one, although it looks like it's not available yet - "ships November 2014".

Personally I think the "additive" technologies are a bit over-hyped, subtractive machines (i.e. milling copper clad) have been around for quite a few years, lol.

The machine I posted appears to also dispense conductive glue, and pick and place the components.....

Theoretically you could print resistors by varying the conductivity of the ink, the resistors could be built into the circuit trace...

And low value caps could be fabbed directly to the board if you could figure out a way to print a dialectric material with a high permittivity....

[darron]

I use a co2 laser to print the pcb resist, but then I still need to use old fashioned acid to etch it. I like this idea a lot more than using a mill!

And of course you can modify a regular inkjet printer to print a mask too rather than ironing on or doing uv chem exposures.

[wgc]

Missed that one, although it looks like it's not available yet - "ships November 2014".

Personally I think the "additive" technologies are a bit over-hyped, subtractive machines (i.e. milling copper clad) have been around for quite a few years, lol.

The machine I posted appears to also dispense conductive glue, and pick and place the components.....

Theoretically you could print resistors by varying the conductivity of the ink, the resistors could be built into the circuit trace...

And low value caps could be fabbed directly to the board if you could figure out a way to print a dialectric material with a high permittivity....

Some pcb mfg are already doing something called embedded passives.

http://www.ipcoutlook.org/pdf/embedded_passive_technology_materials_ipc.pdf

I think this might be why there are a few pedals that are difficult to trace

[R.G.]

Some pcb mfg are already doing something called embedded passives.
...
I think this might be why there are a few pedals that are difficult to trace

Neat.

I doubt any pedals use this - it looks pretty expensive at the moment. It's well inside the infancy end of the S curve. And there are other ways to make pedals hard to trace. Simply making them out of 3- or 4-layer PCBs with ground sheets on the outside layers would do that well enough, even setting aside Dirty Tricks 101 (see geofex).

[R.G.]

I forgot to mention that printing resistors on insulating substrates was popular back in the late 50s and 60s. They printed resistors onto a copper/pattern substrate and glued/soldered ceramic caps onto it, then encapsulated the whole thing in the matte insulation used on disc ceramic caps today. They were called Packaged Electronic Components, (PECs) and were soldered onto simpler PCBs as entire components. Electronic organs from that time would use perhaps 100 of them to implement dividers for the notes.

[amptramp]

This is what R. G. is talking about:

http://www.nostalgickitscentral.com/info/centralabpec.pdf

Some battery portable tube radios used the pendet, a few line operated radios used the audet but almost all televisions used the vertical integrator plates.