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    Printegrated Circuits: Merging 3D Printing and Electronics (spectrum.ieee.org)
    66 points by rbanffy - 15 hours ago

  • Wanted to show off a similar project I did. I used tracks for dupoint wires in my model and used the GPIO pins to push through the wires to create connections.

    For the LED eyes, I created THT connectors using the ends of the dupoint wire ends.

    https://makerworld.com/en/models/672277-wabbt-wifi-bluetooth...

    by p0px - 11 hours ago
  • People have been doing this for a long time, but it feels a little too purist to me.

    The components will still be the same, so you'll still need some kind of pick-n-place functionality to make anything, so why not just have another print head for making the traces / doing the PnP?

    The head could lay copper wire/foil tape for conductors and do standard PnP from trays / reels of components, which you'll need either way.

    It would be a little more geometrically limited than what this post imagines, but it would have the upside that it would actually work today and with most real electronics applications, unlike the low performance conductors made via conductive polymers as the OP's process imagines.

    by nickpinkston - 11 hours ago
  • There's a lot of potential for desktop rapid-prototyping with electronics. I think one of the things that is killing us is the tooling. One of the reasons I started building an autorouter was because I wanted to be able to have different "build targets"- e.g. a build target that is a PCB with no vias and only 0 ohm resistors (jumpers). If our EDA tooling supported different build outputs, then we could have earlier prototypes built with less-than-ideal equipment (e.g. conductive 3D printed filament, as the article suggests)
    by seveibar - 10 hours ago
  • On the one hand, I like the idea. On the other hand, I dread a future where you need an X-Ray and/or MRT machine to be able to inspect any kind of electronic device. And don't even think of disassembling or repairing...
    by xg15 - 9 hours ago
  • Has anyone used dark color 3D filament printed onto copper clad PCB as photo resist or etch resist?

    It might be tricky printing PLA directly to copper clad PCB, but then you could expose the board to UV or etchant to make the PCB traces. Then remove the PLA plastic to expose the copper traces.

    by bitwrangler - 7 hours ago
  • Anyone remember the Next Dynamics NexD1 Kickstarter?

    It was pitched back in 2017 as a "Multimaterial & Electronics" printer. Got to half a million or so in pledges before some of the backers uncovered serious red flags and Kickstarter suspended the campaign.

    Hope this effort fares better.

    by rkagerer - 6 hours ago
  • I have been thinking about adding conductive traces a-la PCB to 3D prints in a DIY setting for a while. Obviously, conductive filaments exist - but they are not remotely in the same category as copper.

    My initial hope was that doping PLA, PETG or some other material with a conductor and then applying strong variable magnetic field near the print head to force creation of conductive domains while the filament is amorphous and hot. This turned out to be not feasible, as O3 explained to me repeatedly, over hours of chats.

    A simpler and surprisingly workable solution appears to be adding a second printing head loaded with tin. Tin is not as good as copper - but it's still leagues ahead of conductive filaments. To offset the poor conductivity you can use thin, but very broad traces.

    A speculative approach would work like this:

    1. Print PETG layers using a regular filament, but leave "baths" for tin traces. A bath should be an opening at least 2-3 millimeters tall, to account for the surface tension.

    2. After N layers, fill the baths from the tin head. Tin melting point is near PETG, but it would cool rapidly and, hopefully, weld to the plastic.

    This way you could probably integrate a pcb into a print. I haven't tried that, but i recall people actually trying to print with tin - so that part is at least not a complete fantasy.

    by monday_ - 6 hours ago
  • We are starting to see metal filaments and even this copper one[1]. Multi-filament fdm printers just might be able to make some rather large circuits. I doubt we'll get down to 0.2mm tracers, but if size isn't an issue, we can do better than the conductive carbon tpu(?) filaments which are common today.

    [1] https://www.gsc-3d.com/3d_materials/copper-filament/

    by pedalpete - 5 hours ago

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