Are you ready to wake up from the cult of Arduino? Tired of plugging together black-box pre-built modules like a mindless drone, copying and pasting in code you found on Hackaday? You’ve soldered together your TV-Be-Gone, built your fifth Minty Boost, and your bench is awash with discarded Adafruit packaging and Make magazines. It’s time to stop this passive consumption. It’s time to create something that is truly yours. It’s time, my friend, to design your first circuit board. And you’ll need a machine to print it.
Outsourcing printed circuit board (PCB) manufacture can be expensive and slow. You want your board now, for free. And designing PCB’s is hard. You’ll make mistakes, and some boards will be wasted. You can etch your own PCB’s at home but the process is fiddly, and notoriously difficult to perfect. What if you had a printer that could make PCB’s? A rapid prototyping machine for circuit boards.
In this talk I will present my progress towards an inexpensive PCB printer by reverse engineering Epson inkjet technology. And I’m not talking about the crappy print-and-bake method you might have seen on the internet. Come and learn about the miracle of microfluidics within the modern consumer inkjet printer, and how to push it to do new, exciting things. I’ll be describing some reverse engineering techniques, a bit of electronics circuit design and the potential for 3D microfabrication with inkjet technology.
[Via Dangerous Prototypes]
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