Hacker News Reader

At $9000 its out of my range.

It's a tool, not a toy. Most tools get bought by parties that have economic reasons to buy them, they typically expect to make back the cost of the tool many times over.

If you can't afford it find someone who could and then rent some time on one.

The same goes for just about any other high cap-ex tool (lasercutters, milling machines, lathes and so on).

Yes, but it's not clear why it's priced at this level.

Is solder paste considerally more complex to extrude compared to the plastics that are the bread and butter of this class of machine?

A typical PCB milling machine would cost 30000USD at the lower end. But looking at boards produced by this machine, it doesn't come close to the quality of a milled board.

I think you could probably develop a milling machine with a similar price point, and some people I believe have used cheap Proxxon (MF70) mills to cut PCBs (the MF70 costs about 400USD). So I'm not sure what the advantage of extruding here is.

I guess it would be interesting if they can do multilayer boards, but from the results shown that doesn't look like a possibility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com