For decently capable(1) desktop manufacturing,"desktop" is a bit of a misnomer at this point. I've found that you need at least three desks, not to mention another desk for all of the test gear, and another for mechanical prototyping, and another for...
At this point, I have(2) an othermill and a pretty-near top-of-the-line LPKF S63 system + silkscreen and reflow capabilities, and am fairly impressed by both. I've been able to go from opening up a PCB editor to having a tested, functional board in under an hour, at least for simple breakouts.
The othermill is pretty flawed for PCB work, however. The spindle just isn't fast enough, cross layer alignment is inadequate, it doesn't have dust control for dealing with FR4 dust, etc. For good PCB routing, some sort of computer vision system for adjusting cut depths and picking up fiducials is also amazingly handy. That being said, we're really impressed with our othermill and do a lot of mechanical work on it - complex aluminum parts, engineering plastics, etc.
Cheap soldering for one-offs is pretty much solved at this point - laser cut a stencil on a decent laser cutter (which everyone should have, anyways), stencil paste, and reflow in a cheap Chinese oven with open source aftermarket firmware. You won't be able to do big BGAs or tiny (0201) passives, but who cares? If you have soldermask capabilities, either some photoresist method or laser cut kapton, soldering tricky components becomes much easier.
None of the additive (ink-based) systems have any hope of producing really useful boards - the electrical and thermal conductivity of real copper is pretty hard to beat, and doing anything controlled-impedance is pretty much out of the picture. With subtractive systems, you can just switch to 8+ oz copper or exotic substrates without changing the process materially...
Vias are tricky. LPKF makes two systems, one with conductive epoxy and the other with electrochemical copper, neither of which are quite satisfactory. Via rivets (or manually soldering wire) work for small boards, but are super tedious and not great for controlled impedance applications, either.
Being able to do decent multilayer boards is contingent on good vias, but in theory, the only other thing you need is a hot press for stacking things up?
Once you get into building complex multilayer boards, the time investment is just silly, even with perfectly calibrated processes, and you should just order from a board house and wait...
(1) I.e. boards better than DIY etching + manual soldering.
At this point, I have(2) an othermill and a pretty-near top-of-the-line LPKF S63 system + silkscreen and reflow capabilities, and am fairly impressed by both. I've been able to go from opening up a PCB editor to having a tested, functional board in under an hour, at least for simple breakouts.
The othermill is pretty flawed for PCB work, however. The spindle just isn't fast enough, cross layer alignment is inadequate, it doesn't have dust control for dealing with FR4 dust, etc. For good PCB routing, some sort of computer vision system for adjusting cut depths and picking up fiducials is also amazingly handy. That being said, we're really impressed with our othermill and do a lot of mechanical work on it - complex aluminum parts, engineering plastics, etc.
Cheap soldering for one-offs is pretty much solved at this point - laser cut a stencil on a decent laser cutter (which everyone should have, anyways), stencil paste, and reflow in a cheap Chinese oven with open source aftermarket firmware. You won't be able to do big BGAs or tiny (0201) passives, but who cares? If you have soldermask capabilities, either some photoresist method or laser cut kapton, soldering tricky components becomes much easier.
None of the additive (ink-based) systems have any hope of producing really useful boards - the electrical and thermal conductivity of real copper is pretty hard to beat, and doing anything controlled-impedance is pretty much out of the picture. With subtractive systems, you can just switch to 8+ oz copper or exotic substrates without changing the process materially...
Vias are tricky. LPKF makes two systems, one with conductive epoxy and the other with electrochemical copper, neither of which are quite satisfactory. Via rivets (or manually soldering wire) work for small boards, but are super tedious and not great for controlled impedance applications, either.
Being able to do decent multilayer boards is contingent on good vias, but in theory, the only other thing you need is a hot press for stacking things up?
Once you get into building complex multilayer boards, the time investment is just silly, even with perfectly calibrated processes, and you should just order from a board house and wait...
(1) I.e. boards better than DIY etching + manual soldering.
(2) Well, they're not actually mine, per se...