Skip to main content

Kickstarter 3D printer will print circuit boards as part of your designs

When people talk about home hack projects that can be put together in a workshop, a lot depends on just what kind of workshop you’re talking about. It’s one thing if your dream is to put together a basic 3D-printed object that could be created with limited space and resources; it’s another entirely if you’re planning to design and print your own 3D-printed gadgets from the ground up.

That’s where Berlin-based startup Next Dynamics’ new NexD1 3D printer — currently on Kickstarter — comes into play. Promising to act as a multi-material and electronics 3D printer in one, it’s an intriguing technology that hopes to be your one-stop shop for all your home tech prototyping needs. Best of all? It’s small (and, dare we say, stylish) enough to sit on your desk.

Recommended Videos

“Originally we were going to build a PCB (printed circuit board) printer, but somewhere along the way we realized we could do so much more than that,” Ben Hartkopp, a member of the Next Dynamics team, told Digital Trends. “That’s how we arrived at the idea of building a multi-material printer that is also capable of printing circuit boards and electronics.”

The NexD1 can print six materials at once and combine these for limitless characteristics — including conductivity, transparency, flexibility, strength, temperature resistance, color, and more. It isn’t a filament-based printer, but rather employs a polyjet-style printing system with a resin-laying print head reminiscent of an inkjet printer.

On top of that, it can also print fully-functional low-resistance circuits, which can then be incorporated into your electronic designs at a precision of 10 microns.

The project is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, where it launched earlier today, and it has already racked up more than half its 200,000-euro ($213,000) target.

Of course, any crowdfunded 3D printer carries a degree of risk — not least because users are being asked to part with a decent amount of money. However, this looks very impressive and if it works as advertised, we’re in for a treat when it starts shipping in September 2017.

You can pre-order your unit from the Kickstarter campaign link above, with prices starting from around $3,000.

“The idea with this technology is to make it affordable and accessible to everyone,” Hartkopp continued. “If you look at the nearest comparable models in terms of functionality, they’re in the $100,000-plus price range. We thought that it should be possible to develop a printer in such a way that it would be much more affordable, while retaining the high quality of industrial printers. This is really for anyone who’s got a dream about some gadget they’d love to make. If you want to build these devices and iterate really fast, all of that’s possible with our machine.”

As The X-Files‘ Fox Mulder once said, “I want to believe…”

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
AMD teases performance of its revolutionary 3D V-cache chip
AMD CEO holding 3D V-Cache CPU.

AMD is currently readying its new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, featuring a 3D V-cache, and it looks like we may soon have a powerful processor on our hands. AMD has teased that we can expect an up to 15% performance boost over the base Ryzen 7 5800X.

The tech giant talked about the new chip during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSSC) and revealed more information about its architecture. While the Ryzen 7 5800X3D will certainly be an improvement, will it be enough to compete with Intel's best processors?

Read more
Fighting football injuries with 3D-printed, hyper-personalized pads
The Protect3d 3D scanning process.

If you’ve ever watched a movie about sports, you’ve seen it. It's that moment that occurs two-thirds of the way into the story, when the protagonists’ inevitable victory suddenly seems a lot less certain. Maybe the inspirational mentor winds up in the ER, muttering motivational slogans from a hospital bed. Perhaps the unorthodox coach wins over the team, only to be fired by management for thinking too far outside the box. Possibly the star lacrosse player has a crisis of faith and realizes he wants to be an acapella singer rather than a jock.

 

Read more
AMD’s 3D-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D is ‘world’s fastest gaming processor’
AMD CEO presenting new CPU.

The first processor to use a 3D V-Cache technology was announced at the big AMD CES 2022 keynote. The tech was first announced at Computex 2021, and fans have been eagerly awaiting a processor that will put it to use.

That processor is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which seems like a strange place to start a new range of processors. AMD has its Ryzen 9 chips, after all. That's because the new Ryzen 7 can outclass AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X while gaming, despite using the same architecture.

Read more