When I was in Germany last summer, Caelan (my smarter, better looking half) arranged a tour of a small engineering firm that built high performance PCB’s for Porsche’s racing class vehicles. It was a great experience.

This small team designed, built, and shipped these complex boards, in a single office of a couple thousand square feet. I got to see some of that fabrication technology in motion – see how they printed the board, and how components were placed on the board extremely rapidly by robot arm. One guy oversaw each piece from beginning to end. Two checked for errors and shipped (or routed to the engineers for testing). It was a very lean, very innovative kind of place. 13 people. (2 partners, 1 customer service, 7 engineers, 1 fabricator, 2 quality assurance/shippers).

This is the kind of technology that can make that kind of sophisticated technology fabrication widespread – both geographically and across domains.

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product. We are creating this software in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their Arduino and other electronic-based prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and to create a pcb layout for manufacturing.

Browse Timeline

• « Post Carbon Institute
• » Fortifying Airplot

Comments ( 2 )

Add a Comment