Squink: Low-cost and Fast Circuit Manufacturing
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

This is a guest blog by Carlos Ospina, Co-Founder at BotFactory. We'll be sharing the stage with BotFactory at the next MakeIt NYC meet up on August 6, 2014. Come say hi!

For years now industrial designers have been using 3D printers and laser cutters to build their prototypes in a matter of hours. Conversely, Electrical Engineers are stuck with traditional methods for circuit prototyping. Such methods are expensive, lengthy and require messy and complex processes.

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“Squink” -BotFactory’s desktop circuit factory- promises electrical engineers, hobbyists and hackers the ability to quickly build and test a circuit, lowering the manufacturing time from 10 days to 30 minutes, and the manufacturing cost from US$250 to US$5 or less.

Circuit designers can easily adapt their current design process to use Squink as it uses GERBER 274x files -the most common format in the industry and the default format for manufacturing- to print and assemble a circuit. With Squink they are able to test and tune small parts of the circuit before integrating them to a larger system; and even the whole system itself can be tested once it’s ready. Even more, geographically dispersed teams will be able to effectively collaborate on the designs, as the circuit design can be sent and built identically in different locations without effort. This makesSquink the first “Circuit Teleporter” in the world.

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This new tool is a game changer for the hardware industry. It means companies will be able to keep their intellectual property in-house and protected. It also accelerates their development cycle, saving time and money, and allows them to better predict the cost and schedule of the project. When the race to the next electronic product begins, companies with access to this technology will be better prepared to face competitors and maneuver to take the ship to safe harbors.

The current (FR4+copper) manufacturing process has been around for decades. It has evolved from a simple single layer process to become a standard, and has been improved with techniques brought by the community such as multi-layer boards, multi-sided assembly, and signal robustness guidelines. Squink can replicate many of these hacks, but is still in its infancy. We’re looking for people willing to try a new way to create circuits, and help us bring this new technology to maturity.

Squink is currently available via Kickstarter, and can handle boards with minimum trace widths of 10 mils and minimum spacing of 10 mils. This allows you to work with components as small as SOICs or 0603 parts.

To get more information about Squink or BotFactory, visit us at http://www.botfactory.co/.

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