Cirqoid – printed circuit board prototyping machine

Now that is very nice. It does board milling, pick-and-place, and solder paste. It's the latter two operations that matter. ("In this world, you do not make your own PC boards." - The Art of Electronics. Board houses do it better using photo-etching, are cheaper, give you plated through holes, and have fast turnaround.)

Here's a nice hobbyist pick-and-place machine: http://briandorey.com/post/DIY-Pick-and-Place-V2-Project-Com... This one has a vision system to get precision alignment. In the era of the $10 cell phone camera module, there's no reason to have one without a vision system. You design some fiducial marks on the board, and the vision system goes looking for them to get precision alignment. This makes up for small errors in the board position. When putting down a part, the vision system matches up the expected pattern of pads with what it sees and fine-tunes the position. This is easier than trying to hold everything so rigid that blind placement works. A vision system also lets you check that you picked up a part properly from the feeder, and that it's in place properly after placement.

Your little assembly line is then a pick and place machine, a solder-paste dispensing machine, and a reflow oven, which can be a toaster oven with precision temperature controls. There are many small shops in Shenzhen like that.

This is a popular space right now:

Voltera: http://volterainc.com/ Voxel8 Tempo Automation: http://tempoautomation.com/

People are realizing that iterating on electronics is painful hence trying to fix it. The interesting part is the market size, unit costs etc. Also ability to do very small pitch ICs.

We got so desperate with pick and place that we literally 3D printed a 3D printer adapter combined with our vacuum pump and Pronterface. https://twitter.com/flairvents

Very cool. Add a camera to do pick-and-place alignment automatically, and I'll take one. P&P is pointless with that much manual intervention.

Another obvious improvement: offer a hot air nozzle tool, with a preheater in the base. It would be really neat to go from bare copper to an assembled PCB without moving the board.

Oh, and an automatic tool changer. :)

Not to be negative, but I am simply not impressed. I thought milling PCBs was over about 15 years ago when pcbexpress and the like of plot and go quick turn services came to the market. There is just no reason to mill your own boards anymore (and -ugh- manually fill your own vias) with services around like dirtypcb.

If you truly need a quick turnaround, pcbexpress can get you a slightly higher quality board tomorrow for less than $200. That's around 1/15th the cost of this device, and a better product (i.e. less likely to cause a problem which will waste a ton of your time)

The pick-n-place aspect is somewhat interesting, but HaD had a project for a $300 pnp machine; I expect to see something like it on kickstartr soon.

Rapid prototyping circuit boards is still relatively expensive and limited compared to the options for purely physical objects. I don't believe we will unlock the value of 3D printers until banging out circuit boards is as quick and easy.

One thing I've learned from using standard CNC mills to do this sort of thing over the years is that the V bit has to be brutally sharp to avoid tearing up the fine traces as it cuts. A high quality cutting bit makes the difference.

Also be careful of the dust. Especially from the fiberglass substrates. Its nasty stuff.

Can it do 4 layer PCBs? Probably the most important thing missing.

They conveniently omit how they do the plated-through holes.