The Living Architecture Systems Group is a highly interdisciplinary group of artists, designers, architects, psychologists and engineers dedicated to bringing the built environment around us to life. They're using the V-One PCB Printer to create small, gentle circuit boards that integrate seamlessly and beautifully into our surroundings.
Voltera visited Stanford University to see the amazing alternative electronics research conducted by Professor Bao’s Research Group. They are using the V-One to print stretchable, biocompatible inks for use in robotic skin and biomedical wearable technology.
The V-One is a precision dispensing system that is tailored for screen printable materials.
Use the V-One to experiment and validate your patterns on rigid, flexible or stretchable substrates.
The V-One can be customized to your requirements. Swap in your own inks, bring your own substrates, and set the temperature profile for all sorts of materials and substrates.
The bulk resistivity of our ink is 9.5E-7 Ohms.m and the sheet resistance under typical conditions is 12 mOhms/sq. It is among the best conductive inks on the market. While it is not as conductive as copper, it is capable of handling almost all digital and analog applications.
A single ink cartridge will allow you to print up to 85 Hello World boards. This also equates to 100 m of conductive trace at 8 mil width, or 200 cm2 of solid pour. The number of boards you are able to print will depend on size and complexity of the circuits you are building.
The ink cartridge has an official shelf life of 12 months and should be stored in the refrigerator when not used.
An 8 month research partnership with the University of Alberta demonstrated the ink will perform on par with standard copper up to 5 GHz!
To learn about conductivity considerations, visit this article in our support docs.
We've tested our printed PCBs under 100mA load for 4 months in ambient, high-temperature (60°C) and low-temperature (5°C) environments, with no detectable change in performance.
We recommend you stick with through-hole for large components like connectors, but use surface mount components for resistors and capacitors.
For passive components, we can dispense ink down to 0402 pads. For IC's, although we officially support 0.8 mm pin to pin pitch, 0.65mm has been shown to work reliably.
Your mileage may vary, and you're definitely in adventure mode. Much of custom ink printing is trial and error, and dependent on the material properties of your custom formulation, so accuracy and reliability are impossible to promise. In very general terms, materials that you can screen print are the best place to start, but we can't guarantee that something will or won't work. Many of our power users do dispense custom inks, so if you have questions about specific materials reach out to Voltera using the in-app support chat and we'll help you through it.
We use copper rivets for a couple of reasons. First: structural stability. Having a solid copper sleeve through your board is going to be much sturdier than cured ink. Second: hand soldering. Working with copper rivets allows for a nice solid metal surface to solder to, making hand soldering much easier.
Absolutely. Just keep in mind that this will throttle your access to the in-app support chat and automatic updates for your printer.
Yes, but only single-sided boards with a maximum height below 7mm, to accomodate the z-axis clearance of the V-One.
Simply put, because solder paste is much more forgiving than conductive ink. Solder paste tends to be drawn to the components during the reflow process so we can reliably dispense on smaller pads.
The maximum board thickness for the V-One clamps is 3mm. Check our our full tool spec to learn more.
The V-One only drills the substrate - meaning, you can create a hole through your substrate which is the same size as the drill bit you select. The V-One does not support routing or milling.
128mm x 116mm (5.0" x 4.5"). Visit our specs page for full product details.
While multi-layer additive electronics is a dream for Voltera, and we're working hard to enable this functionality, currently we only support 2 layer boards.
The Voltera software allows you to use whatever CAD tool you are already comfortable with! You can use EAGLE, Altium, KiCad, Mentor Graphics, Cadence, DipTrace and more! Just export your designs as Gerbers and upload to our software. Easy as that!
The V-One currently does not have an integrated pick-and-place, so components must be placed by hand. The V-One has been designed to be a prototyping tool. At these volumes setting up a pick and place machine can take more time and effort than manual placement.