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Comment by atrus | Hacker News Reader

It's really expensive or difficult to have a one off object made though, and that's where 3D printing thrived. It fulfills that rapid prototyping itch.

People don't even really etch their own pcbs anymore, it's so fast and cheap, let alone spend $10k+ to manufacture a six cent item (maybe!), so there never was enough motivation for a diy movement to make ICs and other nanofabbed stuff

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Especially when the goal is not the 6 cent item but rather the thing the six cent item makes possible.

I would whip out the credit card if I could make 555 timers at home for fun for $1,000.

Not sure if I put a second mortgage on my house to have a chance at maybe making one if I didn't screw up too much.

Nobody ever created a reliable self-contained foolproof PCB etching procedure. That's why nobody etches their own PCBs.

If there was a box that received supplies and outputted usable PCBs with minimum external mess, a lot of people that currently buy boards would use it instead.

(And well, PCB manufacturing is basically the same process as chip fabrication, without the miniaturization. If nobody managed to create a "PCB printer", why do people keep hopping for a "chip printer"?)

Etching your own PCBs has been a common electronics hobbyist activity for 50 years or more. Un-etched one-layer and two-layer PCBs were a standard stock item at every Radio Shack. Local electronics stores stock ferric chloride etchant.

Its true, I'm not even that old (late 30s) and used to etch tons of PCBs for ham radio projects.

My grandfather taught me how to do it 40 years ago.

> Nobody ever created a reliable self-contained foolproof PCB etching procedure

LPKF did, it's just expensive.

> That's why nobody etches their own PCBs.

Get into exotic laminates and ultra-high-speed performance with very tight tolerances and you'll see some prototyping done in-house.

Sure, that's the initial niche of 3D printing. But now people want to be able to repeatedly print something else again and again without having to do some sort of maintenance on the machine.

Now, you're getting those massive print farms that are able to change what they produce on the next print.

you're spot on!

clearly a big part of why all these tech has been so succesful is also how it's all about investing a lot up front, but eventually being able to mass produce in a ridiculous scale, few industries have such a ratio (possibly pharma?)

so it's all about making chips by the hundreds of thousands. it requires a very different approach from any tech intended to make chips by the handful

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