I think this (or something like it) could be profoundly interesting and useful, and perhaps laden with fewer chemical processes than traditional pcb making. W

I think this (or something like it) could be profoundly interesting and useful, and perhaps laden with fewer chemical processes than traditional pcb making. We're printing an alloy and sticking it to some fiberglass. What's not to like? The first problem is attaching components without remelting those solder wires, they didn't show that. Are they doing surface mount or through hole? It looks like it would be for through hole only, but that might be okay for certain boards. But I would worry about over heating the parts in that it might ruin the traces. The second problem is they didn't get a good enough squish off the hotend. It looks like the surface tension of the solder forced it to raise off the board. I don't know if a cooling fan would have helped here or not, but I suspect that .28mm distance is still too high. I would probably want a 0.10mm height. I also wonder if there's a different approach that would make even more sense, like a conductive ink or uv-curable paint. It also might make an easy way to make vias and surface mount pads. Here's one such source, but they seem super expensive. https://novacentrix.com/product-category/conductive-inks/ https://novacentrix.com/product-category/conductive-inks/ Edited to Add: Oh and here's a system already doing just that: https://www.voltera.io/ https://www.voltera.io/