Ed and I have a final-year student - Rhys Jones - who's working on RepRap for his MEng research project. He's been taking the old idea of depositing metal in channels and an observation of Forrest's and Nophead's (that you don't need a low-melting-point alloy because the specific heat of metals is so low that they shouldn't melt the plastic anyway).He's adapted the pinch-wheel extruder to drive ordinary solder (without core flux - that just makes a mess) down through a thin tube with a nichrome heater wrapped round it.Here's his first circuit. It was made entirely automatically by the RepRap machine. It's a bit blobby, but...It's easy to put the components in from the other side. It's the RepRap opto endstop circuit.Finally, here it is fitted to the RepRap machine that made it and working:

Labels: reprapped electronics