Every project starts with a personal frustration

When designing and building my previous product, a device that attached to a smartphone turned it into a retro gaming console, I encountered many difficulties when designing hardware. As a newbie (I am still ) I made a lot of mistakes an needed to iterate the design tons of times. Through this experience I realized how inefficient hardware design was and, thanks to the uncountable days lost, I became with the idea of designing and building this project. Let me explain it to you:

What about in-house circuit manufacturing? Far from the state of the art

One of the main revolutions over the last decade has been the democratization of 3d printing. Through this technology many individuals have achieved to bring their ideas into reality, something that a few years earlier was unthinkable. Lots of businesses and startups have been able to reduce time and, therefore, costs in manufacturing and prototyping phases. But, above all, a great community around this technology has been created. A community that brings people together to work on improving and making it as accessible and cheap as it is today.

Most products we use everyday have both a mechanical and electrical system. 3D printing has revolutionized the mechanical side but, has the same thing happened with electronics? Not at the same level of simplicity and flexibility.

The truth is that, in the prototyping phase, platforms like Arduino have made very accessible this engineering field: we can easily find tons of sensor and actuator modules as well as development boards for almost any application we can imagine. But, despite all this, there is still a huge gap between this early prototype phase and a mid/final hardware state that perfectly fits our projects and needs.

How cool is this?

This is still a challenging step for students, makers and businesses. We still depend on long waiting times when manufacturing professionally-made PCBs apart from the high costs involved sometimes. This makes hardware design costly and inefficient. If you want to move forward from this slow iteration process you could jump to different in-house options like cnc milling machines or some other cumbersome chemical processes. All these techniques have a steep learning curve in addition to the fact that you will have to spend a couple of thousands if you aim to get decent results when going for a high end machine option. In summary, all very far from the state of the art of 3d printing.

Typical toner transfer + ferric chloride etching process

We have to definitely change this

Hardware design has to be fast, with today’s technology is not understandable why we still cannot cheaply jump from a digital to a physical design in a matter of minutes when designing circuits. This project aims to solve this situation building a fully integrated desktop PCB manufacturing platform focussed on the user first as its main goal. It is going to allow people not to waste time or resources when prototyping PCBs and just focussing on design and iteration. A machine whose learning curve will be just unboxing it, loading the design files, and push print. I aim to empower anyone, from young students to professional individuals, to turn an electrical circuit, in a cost-effective way, into something real in matter of minutes. All these supported by an open philosophy so the project can grow fast and democratize PCB printing. 

Welcome to a new era