Printing metal on glass with lasers [video] | Hacker News Reader

Printing metal on glass with lasers [video]

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45 pointssurprisetalk14 comments

There is enormous space of unexplored manufacturing processes and product designs, simply because they lay outside of conventional design canon and standardized engineering practices.

I notice this as well, so much manufacturing is based around injection molding or other plastic related materials.

It's refreshing to see new techniques/ technologies used with things like metal and glass.

And also because they're difficult to scale and there are cheaper, better processes.

They are better and cheaper before zillions of man hours were invested into polishing the warts.

A lot of useful manufacturing techniques are simply not public because it is very expensive to discover them, and obviously most entities don't want to share their techniques with other.

If anything, non-standard not-well-known techniques have only been popularized recently because software is used so much in hardware design these days that some hardware designers have imbued the ethos of FOSS. Without that I doubt people will share niche techniques like this which have the potential to make lots of money.

Looks like he rediscovered Pulsed Laser Deposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_laser_deposition

Not quite. Their process is in ambient conditions (not the vacuum of PLD) and produces molten droplets and not plasma. But for low-precision work (I deal in fractions of microns at work) this sounds like a neat & cheap DIY if you already happen to have a pulsed laser CNC setup.

Applied Science did something fairly similar (but wholly distinct!) on ceramic sheets a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxXEI0Ce6C0

bringing it up only because the techniques seem like they could possibly borrow ideas from one another.

Could be useful for ephemeral circuitry. When he mentioned printing copper onto glass, I immediately shot to spycraft and having disposable circuitry for clandestine operatives who could simply smash the glass, breaking the device and making it hard to discern what it was for, even if parts of it were found after the fact.

This would make for a heck of a cool business card. Though it wouldn’t be durable at all, being glass and with fractures from the heat.

Maybe instead it’s a cool way to do a “congratulations on 5 years with the company” trophy since those just sit on your desk :)

The remarks at the end about cover-flip-etch and controlling oxides with gases do make me wonder about applications in fabricating microfluidic chips with integrated catalysts and/or electrical leads &c. Cool stuff!

Seems similar to vapor deposition, though probably it looks like particles rather than vaporization.

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