Printing electronic circuit boards from your desktop is definitely something every electronics engineer must try. It is not the easiest thing to do, but with the right amount of advancements and technical know-how, it does become quite easy. Squink is one such tool that will help you with such tasks.
You can easily print an electronic circuit board that is solder free assembling technique from the luxury of your desktop that too in a few minutes. There used to be a time when such an operation would take hours together to complete. Today, with massive developments in the technical space, mass printing on circuit boards are easy, cheap and quick too.
Squink is a mini electronic circuit printer that can be worked upon in your living room – yes! That is the entire place you need to work on it. It is quite easy to use and it is normally done in two stages – printing and assembling. For the first part of the application, it will print the circuit on a substrate that is made by a conductive ink using a simple printing method; normally simple inkjet printing is used. It will then be coated with conductive glue dots. This is applied so that the components of the printed circuit boards are held together. Once this is complete, the entire assembly is fixed. Here, all the components are placed in the right place and then aligned for the right polarity before they are placed on the specific glue dots. This will complete in a few minutes.
Squink also uses multilayer printing and when a single layer is done, it will paint a protective insulation later on the entire circuit board. When a single layer is complete, it will start on the protective insulation layer on the complete surface. It will then be treated to a heat curing procedure and then another circuit is printed on the insulated later.
Using this method, you can integrate multiple circuits on a single substrate. At the same time, you can make this entire process wirelessly. It can be completed on your desktop with a USB or an Ethernet connection plus you do not have to set up or install a third party system on your desktop to control it. Drag and drop commands are and enough to initiate and complete the printing process.
Most electronic circuit designers use Gerber and Squink reads the same files – this is a huge positive. At the same time, you can also print circuits from other image formats that we use often – .jpg or .png etc. Very comfortable indeed! The product is definitely for the future and needs a lot of upgrades but it definitely a step in the right direction. It will definitely help PCB manufacturers to complete work quicker and gives them the biggest advantage – flexibility.
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