Print your circuit boards, dispense solder paste, and reflow! The Voltera V-One lets you go from concept to creation in minutes.
Building hardware sucks! Whenever we wanted to create a circuit board for an electronics project, we were forced to mess around with dangerous chemicals or send it to a fab house and wait for weeks for the board to arrive.
Voltera V-One Overview
The Voltera V-One can create a prototype board right from your work bench. Gerber files go in; FR4 boards come out. The magic happens in the middle. The printer lays down a conductive ink to create the traces and an insulating ink as a mask between layers.
These boards aren’t meant to replace mass manufactured PCBs – this is a prototyping tool that helps you get there faster. How many times have you tossed out a board because you used the wrong footprint or because you forgot a pull-up resistor? If you’re anything like us… more times than you’d like to admit. Now you can quickly test an idea without wasting money or two weeks of your time!
While the V-One might look like the laser printer for PCBs, it’s not quite at that level of convenience. There are numerous steps requiring user interaction, and the total print time for a very simple board was about an hour. You need to be careful about calibration, or you’ll have continuity problems. Yes, this is much quicker than the turnaround time of a PCB fab, but it’s not instant.
Finally, there’s some obvious limitations. This isn’t a mill, so it’s only going to be able to do surface mount. The print area is only 138 mm by 102 mm (5.5″ x 4″) which will limit the size of your boards. At a price of $2199, it’s not the cheapest way to make your own PCBs, though it’s well below the price of professional PCB mills.