The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#260 – An interview with Ariel Briner of Cartesian Co

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Ariel - Recording

  • Another Aussie! Ariel and his team are from Brisbane, which is in Queensland, Australia.
  • Dave interviewed Ariel on site at CeBIT
  • Moved to Brooklyn where there are other 3D printing companies:
  • The product that Cartesian Co makes is called the Argentum. Formerly called the EX1, when it was raising money on Kickstarter.
  • They are currently on batch 4. 200 total have shipped, 80 went to Kickstarter backers.
  • The Argentum uses 2 part ink vs 1 part ink (nano particles) make by companies like Dupont, Mitsubishi and Mithode. Currently these only are advertised to print on pre treated materials.
  • The printer itself uses old inkject cartridges to deliver the inks.
  • Competitors:
    • Voltera
    • Voxel8
    • AgIC
    • Real competitor is low cost batch services and milling/etching boards
  • The focus was on an MVP…just like in Southpark.
  • The reason for using silver is copper chemicals are much more dangerous to handle.
  • Cartesian is planning on creating multi layer boards using insulative ink in selective areas.
  • One interesting future avenue is printing on fabric/paper. The paper can even be reflowed. 
  • A current issue is stringing, which causes unwanted shapes on a print. 
  • The specs – 20 mil space/trace.
  • Dave was interested about the business setup moving to the US. Cartesian is setup as a corporation in Delaware, as many are.
  • Apparently internet denizens can now also apply to be part of Estonia as a digital citizen. 
  • We were of course discussing “Fartesian Faux, Inc” in all of these discussions.
  • Though investment in startups is changing via the JOBS act, it might not be as much as people expect. Public/general solicitation is still very restricted, especially since the SEC rewrote some of the rules. 
  • The main idea is to protect investors without much money from losing their life savings. This was implemented during the great depression. China  is experiencing a crash right now because of similar boundless enthusiasm in their stock market (and the resulting correction/crash)

Many thanks to Ariel for telling us more about circuit printers. It seems like the desktop technology has some fun years ahead. Chris is looking forward to getting his skin printed on and eventually getting a Cartesian chip printer.

Comments

  1. If they are using silver nitrate you might want to hold off getting it to print on your skin Chris. It is corrosive and used medically to cauterise, remove granulation tissue and warts. It would probably be neutralised before causing permanent damage…

    Wikipedia says silver nitrate reacts explosively with ethanol, which would explain the fire printing.

      • It sort of ‘burns’ into the top layer of skin, and turns black after exposure to sun. Generally peels off as the top skin layer naturally sloughs off. Constant overexposure could be bad but I have played with it a bunch and never had anything bad happen (ymmv). Also in their process it seems like the silver nitrate is almost immediately reacted away anyway, which should help. Good luck Chris 🙂

        • Ariel did mention their fingers get black when working with the cartridges but that it doesn’t ever have any lasting damage. I assume this is how they figure out they could print on skin and I volunteered to be the first sucker.

  2. Last week when you said the guest would be Australian I guessed it would finally be an interview with Doug Ford. 🙂

    • Am I the only one who hears a high frequency background noise on most of this episode?

      • Listening again, I totally hear it. Could be the CODEC picking up noise since Ariel was in Brooklyn. It does weird things with background noise. Or could have been a power supply on a laptop or something. Sorry about that!

        • Good, I’m not crazy. I was trying to pick it out on Audacity’s spectrum analyzer. It didn’t show it.

  4. I am a RF engineer, I worked for a company that spend more money on software than employs. Having something that could make boards in a couple of minutes would save money in just electricity for computer power not even counting human time spend waiting for boards made.