You are right that pad/silk printing would be too limiting if your goal would be to print anything. The goal of pad printing is just to put _a_ color on a board, and then modify your design to that (or two colors, with the tide pod). There are definite tradeoffs. Good work.
Great that you're doing so well! I used to buy some components off you when LB was still a part time thing for you... many many moons ago. Love that you're still exploring and pushing your own boundaries!
The real credit should go to Maddy who consistently does the drudge work day in, day out. This frees me to explore things with the amazing JP Liew.
I’ve worked a lot with exposed pcbs or pcbs that are shown on business fairs or shows, so it’s very interesting.
We are using it today in production on https://www.littlebird.com.au/collections/shakeup .
>> What kind of price breaks are we talking about?
Shoot me an email on marcus@ and we can talk more. If you're an open-source / indi-hw-dev we're looking at $0.
I'm thinking "printing on an existing ~ATX motherboard". ;)
>> Makernet
I believe they were only doing pad printing/silk printing.
>> The problem with _all_ of these solutions is that these coatings do not work in a reflow oven.
PCBs can be printed on before population with parts (although not always required depending on the design).
We bake our PCBs, specifically in reflow ovens. We adjust our colours so that they match the target colour after heating cycle completes.
>> The solution I've found is pad printing
We looked into pad printing, but it was too limiting in terms of setup time and graphics.
It also lacked the ability to for mass customisation of products.