These types of lasers might be a stopgap if tariffs make buying from those companies inordinately expensive, however the extreme cost, and the need to do a bunch of cleanup kind of makes me suspect there needs to be another iteration of this tech.
Specifically we had issues with added graphics not in my GERBERS, and some through hole plating issues.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/comments/9bt5ed...
And $2.10 plus shipping for 5 boards, $7.50 for ten (4layer FR4, HASL, small boards) is crazily subsidized for prototyping. It’s like free prototyping boards. Even 6 layer and flex boards are cheap. They also have crazy cheap CNC and 3DP, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Also the integration of the free design tools (easyEDA pro , DFM review, etc) is unbelievably efficient with one-click to order parts or boards lol
I have had a great customer experience so far, but I do suspect they are either subsidized or use a lot of loss leaders to pull people into the ecosystem.
Other companies may offer better quality, but I’m fine with Toyota, I don’t need Rolls Royce for what I’m doing.
His goal of bringing small scale manufacturing down to the workshop / home garage level is really inspiring and is especially relevant in the modern era of tariffs and economic upheaval.
To get good at something people need to get hands on experience and it needs to be affordable and relatively easy to use. The kinds of tools that Stephen is promoting make that possible and that's critical if we want people to get good at building things.
I will say that his presentation style always tilts me a bit. It's his laugh/excitement always seems forced/fake.
However besides the personal dislike, I think its worthwhile to stop giving so much merit based on advertising "open source" or "effort" or "presentation" etc, because frankly many of these YouTube "makers" and the "maker community" are misguiding a lot of people to make bad designs and waste time and resources. People ought to value correctness and quality a bit more, lest our things become even more enshittified than they are now. One would think that hobbies would be a refuge from disposable low quality shit... yet we get RPi Pico et al (which are arguably getting less shitty but still laughable compared to actually good MCU products) and the people who claim to "out do the big corp" by using a Raspberry Pi with an SDR dongle and saying they achieved $50000 of capability with $60 in parts..
Case in point, the Opulo PNP systems are significantly overpriced and have amateurish mechanical as well as circuit design that are worse than cheaper systems like Pandaplacer in terms of reliability and performance.
Also you don't have to reroute, you can build it the same.
And regarding high-speed digital buses... are we being genuine here? Just the fact that you cannot have meaningful design over ground return paths with this thing makes any moderately fast digital link unfeasible. Best you'll be able to manage is regular speed SPI (which also does not need a board like this), you can forget about RGMII, ULPI, LVDS, MIPI, SLVS-EC, or anything else for that matter.
For those who don't know: Vias are not only used to get an electrical connection from one side of the PCB to another.
You also need them to keep radiation in check and often to move heat away.
With this technique, good luck getting through EMC testing for anything but trivial circuits.
I think the issue is that if there's a tarnish on the copper, it will work okay. The problem is when you polish the copper. It turns reflective and will not absorb the energy of the laser.
A 5W UV laser or a 100W MOPA laser will give better results. I'm thinking about a 200W version for black friday.
JKCalhoun•5h ago
I'm not sure I want the trade-off of having to try to fit my existing circuit into those pre-populated vias.
Part of the joy of PCB layout is trying to be "optimal". That might be optimal in board size, optimal in the elegance of the trace layouts. I even trying to minimize vias (or not have them altogether). With prefab vias, there will be kludges to work my own vias into those locations. And, honestly, the unused vias will annoy me as well.
I'm a sucker for solder masks, silkscreening… I think I am too in love with what I get back from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
My "quick prototyping" consists of breadboarding and trashy perf-board mockups.
sokoloff•5h ago
So many times that I’d happily pay $20 to try a board right fricking now (and I doubt they’ll be $20 all-in).
For me, it would replace breadboarding, not replace a final prototype PCB before committing to a first assembly run.
altairprime•5h ago
marcosdumay•3h ago
The author of the video has some previous work on solder masks and silk layers. You may want to check the earlier laser manufacturing videos.