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I took this class with D. in 2019! Was a great whirlwind through digital fab and microcontrollers.

ah this is fascinating!!!! Any more info anywhere?

Let me know how it goes!!

Knex is great! I had a small set growing up, but never one of the big dynamic ones. Did you ever come across Capsela? Another fun modular building kit. The floaty set was awesome.

Yeah, vias in particular are a challenge. I've spent time with annoying tiny copper rivets and bits of wire and the rest, and usually end up making one layer boards with perhaps a few wrap around jumpers to a ground plane. Not ideal! Commercial stuff is damn good.

But! Hand soldering boards is a joy. To each their own.

It's probably not excellent; the grooves are V-shaped and the machine isn't stiff enough to go very deep, so you'd need to take a lot of passes. But a crosshatch toolpath might pull up extra copper on the sides and make fills quickly. I'll run some tests when I'm back home and report back! Would be neat to be able to prototype RF trace circuits same-day.

I designed and fabricated a weird 3D printed 4-axis CNC machine (in ~3 months, oof) which uses carbide inserts to carve tiny isolation routes in chunks of PCB substrate. It's very much a finicky proof-of-concept, and may very well host fatal hidden gremlins which doom the project to novelty status, but with a bit of care I can produce boards with 6/6 design rules (0.15 mm spaces and traces) at 20-30 mm/s, roughly an order of magnitude faster than a desktop mill with significantly less noise.

I gave a talk this weekend on the machine at the eighth Hackaday Supercon, which will be on YouTube at some point, but for now here is a link to the project page, including design files and a few dozen hasty project logs.

We can, using big autoclaves and a process called hydrothermal synthesis. It's how we make single crystals that get sliced and diced into quartz oscillators. But the process takes a long time, think mm/day, and isn't really appropriate for making big things like crucibles.

Easy to learn, difficult to master. Great game, needs more levels.