 Hi, I'm Peter Harrop, Chairman of ID TechEx and we're here at a regular exhibitor in the busy ID TechEx show here in Berlin. It is the Bot Factory and Geoff Brampton is going to tell us about it over to you. What on earth are you up to? What on earth are we up to? Yes, no, we're Bot Factory. We're from New York City and we have developed a PCB printing technology. Our machine is capable of not only printing conductive and insulating layers to make a multi-layer circuit, but we can also do dispensing and pull assembly of boards on flexible or rigid substrates. Now here's an example of a two-layer board here. This guy is a actual 3D printed Arduino with QFP, SOIC and edge connectors. Two layers 10 mil or 250 micron traces with 250 micron spaces. We can go all the way down to 200 microns there. Here's a flex board. It's another Arduino design single layer and the essential idea is that anyone can fabricate an electronic device right at their desktop. It's perfect for researchers, people in education, people who are developing products, and essentially anyone who would come to one of wonderful shows like ID TechEx. No, I was very kind of used to say that. In fact, in the domestic environment now, I don't think my son is alone in having 3D printers at home and he won't even go to the Iron Mungus to buy a funnel to pour liquid into something. He prints it. The knee-jerk reaction is anything missing part of the bike. He prints it. Do you think that there's a place in the home environment for this where people would put together electronics or not? I think it's a possibility, but I mean just because we have a paper printer doesn't make you Hemingway or Shakespeare. I think that the importance of a good design comes from iteration and development. So I think it improves the ability for an ear from a younger child to let's say someone who's more of a hobbyist to develop their own ideas. So it increases the capability of the home inventor and someone who's a tinker or thinker or wants to learn something more. But as a replacement for your Iron Munger or your sort of classic situation, your Curry's PC, I don't think so. No okay, that's good. So you actually sell these things? Yes. And to whom do you sell them? Mainly what type of person and where? Well I like to say that we're not digging the gold out of the mines. We're selling the shovel to the miners. So we sell the people who are developing circuit boards, people who are developing new ideas and allowing them to make their board right there in an hour or two because I think a board made takes several weeks. You have to send it off to China or some other fabrication place. They pull it all up and furthermore to make flexible electronics is quite difficult and expensive too. So and there's always a lot of iterative aspects. So people are working in flexible electronics, wearables, medical devices. Companies are doing fashion. Researchers aren't stretchable electronics. And they're capable of essentially doing the things right there and then to iterate and improve. So anyone who's developing new ideas or electronic devices where iteration is a critical part of the process, because it's a new technology or a new idea, that's where this machine really flies. And how big are you as a company? How many of you? We're hiring right now. We're going up to 15 people. Good, great. And you are living a dream. I mean five years from now are you willing to tell us if all goes well where you're going to be in terms of what you're offering and where and why and anything you can share? I mean right now we're just improving that Z dimension aspect to make every single layer correctly so that you get a board that's 100% working right off the bat. Critical challenges we're addressing are things like making sure all the components connect correctly on flexible rigid materials. We want to expand the size of the machine. We want to expand the possible materials that we can print with. But right now we're focusing on fabricating what you see is what you get. You have a board designed, you send it to your machine, you press print, reliably prints everything. It works right off the bat. That's our focus. Five years from now, more materials and bigger size, that's a possibility. But that's a material question that is a lot of the reasons why we're here. There's a lot of people developing new materials and it's really exciting. It's really exciting to see what people are developing now. That's the kind of fuel that drives this product to go further and farther in terms of addressing market needs. Excellent. That's really interesting. Roughly how much does your equipment sell for? Well, we have one product, well this is our SB2. This is our new machine and it goes for $16,000 US dollars and we're exporting around the world out of our space in New York City. We also have our earlier product, Sphinx, which is still for sale for $5,000. The major differences are just really hardware, like one, they both fit in assemble boards, but really our differences in terms of tolerance and board quality and number of layers. There's some virtuosity that you could have in terms of what you can support in electronics, because obviously electronics develops in a simple manner of different overlays and chips and many other things. Is there a route map there where you're saying, well this or that I can't do at the moment? Well, I think we want to focus on the most ideal rapid prototyping technology is the essentially near equivalent to manufacturing quality, but it's done in an hour, cost-be-damped, it's just done really fast. Flip chip and things like that are great for large-scale, high quality fabrications and it's not necessary for us to really focus on making sure our machines can't be compatible with those types of chips. No, you can't trace everything I realized, but I mean if someone was to say a fashion designer and they probably want something fairly wide area and very low profile and they want therefore from you something incredible with that, but it's easy to talk about what comes next and we obviously have here something that can sell considerably as it is, I'm really being critical, it's just exploring the edges of the canvas. So good, okay, thanks very much, really exciting. Thanks for coming again. I appreciate it. See you. Alright, bye for now. Bye bye. It's just a little bit more about this? Sure, sure. So it's happening right now? Believe it or not, this is the actual print board. We're printing the design of the print board that actually runs on this machine. It's an example actually. So it's kind of like it's a mirror image of what it's of its own design. And this is the new machine? Yeah, this is our new SV2 PCB print. SV2. So how many generations have you had so far? We are on generation, this is number two. This is the second version of our second. This is our second product. But you have a smaller one? Yeah, it's called Squink. And so this is kind of Squink version two SV2. That's kind of the idea. The Squink was the first product and this is the second one. And so the one we did last time was Squink one. Yeah. And so what's the main improvement? The main improvement has first let's talk about printing. So we're printing with 300 novels, not 12. So we have a wider print head. So it's half an inch, 16 millimeters. And then the second one is 14 millimeters. But anyways, we're doing the larger area so we can print much faster. The novels are smaller so we can print finer traces. So that's one capability. That allows us to do more layers because we're printing faster. The second capability is the dispensing system. Much more complex systems as motors with a, well you can't see quite here, but there's a cartridge you pull out with a syringe and a motor system on the inside to dispense. And so we can dispense smaller dots, a wider range of materials because it's a stronger motor, and so forth. What's the material that's printing right now? It's printing polymer. That's UV curable. There's UV lamps on the head that cure the material. And it just open air? What's it called? Just does it in any temperature? Well, I mean ambient room temperature. Ambient, you know, humidity. Is this your software? Yeah. So this is our software. And just like with SQUAKE, it's a browser-based system. You don't connect to the internet per se. You basically, what happens is you connect to the machine by e-net. So don't worry, your IP is safe. It's only going between the machine. We only make it browser-based and have a server on the back so that we can update the software. Much more easily. And it also makes the machine software hardware agnostic. It doesn't matter if you're PC, Mac, Linux, whatever. You'll be able to fabricate and connect to the machine and fabricate. And is it shipping? Yeah. So we ship around the world. We've been shipping the past year or so. One more thing about pick and place. So we can pick and place as well. So this is the pick and place head. This is really valuable for a lot of customers because not only can pick and place and assemble board, but you can also assemble your own boards. You've bought from elsewhere. So like before you swap out the head and then you place it in here. There are tip folders over here where you can pick up tips and then pull the components from this component tray or from cut tape right here. I'll use the camera like usual for judicial recognition to make sure the components are correctly rotated in place. Now one really interesting feature you can do now is let's say this is your board that you bought and you wanted to assemble using RSV2. You can place it pretty much anywhere on the substrate in any direction using the dispensing head or pick and place head. You just had to identify a few pads and then the machine will auto-correct and dispense correctly across the board. Is the camera? No. It's actually just simply have to hover over several different pads to make sure the alignment is aligned correctly to the board. It knows where it has to go to and it will dispense the board. So it takes out a little bit of the careful placement of the board so it's 90 degrees to the head and all that jazz. You don't have to worry about that with this machine. So you said there was a squink and this one now? So what have people done so far? Your customers? We have customers who are working in flexible electronics. We have a lot of customers making rapid prototyping boards. They want the boards there and then that day they use our machines for that. And then they can take that and put it into SMT later? Or not really. Can they prototype something and then say we need to tweak it for the mass production? The goal is for our product is that you make the board, you fabricate it a few times and then you're happy with it. You essentially send it out to make thousands of those boards. There may be tweaks required. If you want to make it smaller you may have to fabricate it and design it for manufacturing. Just like with 3D printing, where you print a design you discover I need to add draft angles so I can injection mold the piece. But typically those minimum changes need to be made if you want to make something with our machine and then send it out later on. The PCB designers, what is the name of those softwares that many of them use? EDA, Electronic Design Applications. So EDA industry but they use software, there's some popular ones that they might use. Is that a compatible format? Whatever you do here is compatible with that? Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you're using Eagle, Altium, Cadence, what have you. You export the files as Gerber files with drill files and your Centroid and rotation file which is just a .csv, .xl document with headers. And that information is sort of an industry standard if you send boards out. So we take those imports and you can print with them. However you can also use image files, so I printed silver images. Like images, PNGs, JPEGs, bitmaps, tests and essentially you can upload them to the machine and mold print them. What's the resolution? We're going all the way down to detail the trace with 200 microns and with spaces of 200 microns. That's small. That's equivalent to 8 in 8 mil. Is that small for the PCB market? Yeah, it's probably small. Now it's not as small as your high definition interconnects which often goes to the list 3. But it's acceptable for most applications, most components. Typically the components are the driving force for trace with. And when you have a PCB outputted like this, something like this, is it super reliable? You can put it in like a car and it's just going to work? What's the reliability of the PCB? Well, prototyping is kind of one of those things. You don't want to necessarily put it in a consumer product. You don't mean to want to ask BMW, but would you be comfortable flying? The prototype, BMW. But a prototype? Sure. If it's not going to be on public road, being used by public, I don't see why there's a problem with using it. It's just silver on plastic in the end. It conducts. Now it's going to run under every single sort of possible situation a consumer might go through. No, but for general prototyping where you need to have it now, to test something out, or something non, let's say what's word for it, non-mission critical like lighting. This is a perfect product for that. And we actually see a lot of people in the automotive industry in other critical areas like aerospace. They want this flexible electronics for lighting and things like that. So they just need to make something very fast, but there's a lot of iteration for whatever reason. Lighting or shape or trying to address failure points in a flexible circuit, that kind of thing. Are there lots of what you call those maker spaces and stuff like that? They have this? Yeah, some maker spaces. Typically makers are trying to go as low cost as possible. We're trying to hit the prosumer product development, high end research, that kind of market because they need the kind of specs that we can provide. Nice. So I guess the hardware designers at Google, they can have fun with this. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Google if you can hear me. IoT stuff, future stuff. Cool. All right. Looking forward to more. Yeah man. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.