Voxel8 reveal more about their 3D printed electronics future

by

At the TCT sponsored 3D Printing CES Marketplace back in January Voxel8 caused quite a stir as they launched their developer's kit capable of printing circuitry directly into 3D printed parts. That was just the start of a clearly mapped out path for Professor Jenny Lewis's company spun-out of Harvard University, at RAPID 2015 co-founder Michael Bell revealed more of those ambitions:

"To generate the interest in 3D printing electronics there’s nothing that beats a $9,000 developer kit that you can prototype a PCB on in five minutes" explained Bell. "But in our research centre we have industrial scaled machines that can do pick-and-place, we have technology like mixing nozzles where we can mix conductive ink and resistive inks to generate a specified resistance and actually print it. We have all this technology that can go into our industrial machines but the plans are yet to be finalised."

Unlike the developer's kit, which starts shipping in november, the industrial scale machines are expected to cost hundreds of thousands depending on the needs of specific customers. To ensure the highest quality, Voxel8 are sticking to what they know best and drawing in partners to make the ultimate high-end product.

"Our founder Professor Jenny Lewis is an expert in 3D printing materials, we are really a materials company but nobody had the hardware to dispense the materials, nobody had the software to be able to design parts let alone print them – Autodesk work on the design and we work out how to print them – so we built our own machines.

"We won’t be doing the motion stages internally we’ll be outsourcing that to Aerotech – a very large motion stages company" Bell added. "The customer will select what size builder they want and we’ll apply our machine to that; we’ll build our print engines onto it, our software expertise and the materials science."

Though the developers kit initially ships with a print head containing cartridges that print the matrix FDM materials and the internally developed conductive inks, this is just the beginning for the adaptable machine and actually FDM is not the printing technology of choice. 

"We love epoxies, the epoxies are thermoset so as soon as you print with them they begin to set, that can be accelerated with UV curing. Epoxies have amazing mechanical properties and have a lot better dielectrics than FDM materials, there’s really no other epoxy printer available. In our research facility we have developed epoxies that are carbon fibre reinforced, ones with chopped fibre that have amazing dielectric strengths."

With the likes of Autodesk sending two employees to specifically work on the Autodesk Wire software for Voxel8, the likes of John Kawola on the board and VC backing from the CIA's venture capitalist arm it is safe to say that Voxel8 are going to be a major player in this ever changing industry.