Also, I've been working on this for a while under a beta version called Self-Assembly, which was a bit more fashion oriented. New i-t-s-e rebranding is to be more Lego like. Here's the old website: www.self-assembly.fi
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.
Capsela was really cool! In the end I feel like Lego with the Technics and Mindstorms stuff caught up but for a while Capsela was some of the coolest stuff you could get for making mechanical/electrical systems.
Just install an NSA-B-GONE, my janky open-source modboard that adds Thinklight-controlled USB hardware switches to the webcam and microphone! Designed for the X220, but the X230 is pretty similar so I bet it would work: https://github.com/zakqwy/NSA-B-GONE
Of course, if everyone does that, attackers will just start pulsing Thinklights and seeing if anything enumerates, I suppose.
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.
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.
Oh that’s so cool. I love the ribbons of copper curling up. Might be ok for use cases like prototyping antennas - one place I’d still use a pcb mill for the the turnaround time. How is it at removing larger areas of copper?
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.
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.
