The RepRap project blog covers the open-source, self-replicating 3D printer, including printed circuits, metal printing, and printer improvements.
HN commenters point to it as the source for early printed-circuit work and for ABS vapor smoothing, and as the place for RepRap project news.
People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers.
Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.
It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.
But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/ http://blog.reprap.org/ http://bathsheba.com/ http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code —…
There are other ways to make PCBs with a 3D printer:
Instead of etching copper, some people directly print the circuitry with a solder extruder [1]. The idea's been around for a while [2] but circuit complexity is usually very limited. Here's a guide [3] (to a similar method) that uses a hobbyist 3D printer.
To improve on the article's pen-masking method, you can mount a laser instead of a pen to the 3D printer and expose a specially coated PCB [4]. Or expose UV light through an LCD [5].
One can also just mount a milling tool to the printer and cut away the copper directly [6]. A 3D printer's not designed to take the forces from milling well, so similar but specially designed machines are made [7].
The most impressive methods are geared toward industry:
A cutting-edge industry-grade electronics 3D printer looks like [8]: an inkjet-style printer with conductive and insulating (dielectric) inks.
Somewhat related, you can use a laser etching and electroplating process ("3D Moulded Interconnect Devices" "3D MID") to make PCBs on 3D printed weirdly shaped (i.e., definitely not flat) surfaces. [9] is an impressive example, and definitely check out a search engine's image results [10].
[1] http://diy3dprinting.blogspot.com/2015/01/voxel8-conductive-ink-embedded.html
[2] http://blog.reprap.org/2009/04/first-reprapped-circuit.html
[3] https://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printing-3D-Print-A-Solderless-Circuit-Board/
[4]…
The Prusa Mendel sells for $799 on Makergear and can print at 1/10 the layer height of a Replicator 2. Thats the same price as the Pandabot (well, give or take $1), the advantage of the Pandabot is that it auto-calibrates and is excessively easy to assemble.
Although the official spec lists a 100 micron layer height, technically, I see no reason why a Pandabot couldn't print at the same resolution as a Prusa Mendel. Having seen both a Pandabot and a Prusa Mendel in person the electronics and hot end are similar enough that there is really no reason they couldn't achieve the same 10 micron resolutions on the PandaBot.
Sources:
- http://www.makergear.com/products/3d-printers
- http://blog.reprap.org/2011/12/001-layer-height-on-prusa-mendel.html
Well, the more I looked into this possibility, the more I think it's not going to look like traditional electronics that we know. Chances are, somebody's working on this right now, and we just don't know about it.
There's been some promising blips here and there with the reprappers:
http://blog.reprap.org/2011/06/new-approach-to-printing-metals.html
http://blog.reprap.org/2012/04/some-more-printed-circuitry.html
That's not surprising, since MakerBot founder Zach Smith is a RepRap contributor and also runs the RepRap Research Foundation (http://www.rrrf.org/). MakerBot's fabricators are based on RepRap designs and software, and they also sell RepRap parts in their store.
The two projects still contribute code and ideas to each other, for example: http://blog.reprap.org/2009/08/one-of-my-partners-at-makerbo...
Cologne, Germany. I'm running a 3d printing workshop on the weekend here. If you're interested, have a look at http://dingfabrik.de/2011/11/24/3d-drucker-an-einem-wochenende-selber-bauen/ (same info in English at http://blog.reprap.org/2011/11/reprap-prusa-iteration-2-build-event-in.html ). There's only a couple spots left though.