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Designing and prototyping your own electronic circuit boards can be time-consuming and costly. Hours can be spent creating prototype layouts, layering, etching and painstakingly soldering the board together. The alternative is getting larger factories to create a printed circuit board for you. However, this process can still take up to a week, and can be a fairly expensive process for a one-off or small-batch design. Alternatively, if you decide to opt for a quicker, cheaper manufacturer, the product may not necessarily be of the highest quality.
This is where Canadian start-up Voltera aims to step in with its product V-One: a desktop rapid-prototyping technology that can take you from a computer design to a custom circuit board in an hour, rather than days or weeks.
The four-strong team have all previously worked at electronics companies and were frustrated at the lack of rapid-prototyping technology in the sector. Often they would have to order circuit boards from the other side of the world – a source of frustration that could set projects behind schedule. “We live in a world where mechanical engineers can prototype designs from their workbench using 3D printing, and software developers haven’t had to line up with punch cards to test their ideas in decades. It’s time for rapid prototyping to reach the electronics industry,” says Alroy Almeida, co-founder of the company.
The designs are printed using conductive ink, which is only just becoming commercially viable. This meant the team had to spend more than a year carrying out chemical research and development into making their own conductive inks before developing the printing mechanism itself.
The desktop printer has swappable print heads for the conductive ink that creates the electrical traces and for an insulating ink, which users can use to create masks for two-layer boards. It also eases the soldering of components to both printed and pre-fabbed boards, with its automatic solder paste dispensing and reflow features. It can bake the board for you, too.
Ultimately, Voltera has made the whole process of designing a board much simpler – just use your chosen circuit design software, then import the design to the Voltera as an industry-standard Gerber file, and you’re ready to print.
According to the company, V-One is the first conductive ink printer of its kind and price that can do more than print single-layer circuits on paper, but can also print electrically separated two-layer circuits onto industry-standard circuit board substrates.
Voltera has sold 500 products worldwide since it first launched on crowdfunding site Kickstarter in February 2015. “As we ship more and more printers, we’re seeing so many different use cases,” says Almeida. “Customers want to print on different substrates, or print using their own materials. We’re working hard to make the print process as easy as possible and to support all our customers. Some recent changes include developing a self-calibrating probing mechanism that measures the z-axis of a board, and developing a more modular design to ease and speed up assembly.”
The Voltera V-One costs $2,499 and is available from voltera.io/