There is enormous space of unexplored manufacturing processes and product designs, simply because they lay outside of conventional design canon and standardized engineering practices.
abdullahkhalids · 35m ago
A lot of useful manufacturing techniques are simply not public because it is very expensive to discover them, and obviously most entities don't want to share their techniques with other.
If anything, non-standard not-well-known techniques have only been popularized recently because software is used so much in hardware design these days that some hardware designers have imbued the ethos of FOSS. Without that I doubt people will share niche techniques like this which have the potential to make lots of money.
chiffre01 · 5h ago
I notice this as well, so much manufacturing is based around injection molding or other plastic related materials.
It's refreshing to see new techniques/ technologies used with things like metal and glass.
ThrowawayTestr · 1h ago
And also because they're difficult to scale and there are cheaper, better processes.
varjag · 1m ago
They are better and cheaper before zillions of man hours were invested into polishing the warts.
Not quite. Their process is in ambient conditions (not the vacuum of PLD) and produces molten droplets and not plasma. But for low-precision work (I deal in fractions of microns at work) this sounds like a neat & cheap DIY if you already happen to have a pulsed laser CNC setup.
bringing it up only because the techniques seem like they could possibly borrow ideas from one another.
v7n · 5h ago
The remarks at the end about cover-flip-etch and controlling oxides with gases do make me wonder about applications in fabricating microfluidic chips with integrated catalysts and/or electrical leads &c. Cool stuff!
boredinstapanda · 4h ago
Seems similar to vapor deposition, though probably it looks like particles rather than vaporization.
If anything, non-standard not-well-known techniques have only been popularized recently because software is used so much in hardware design these days that some hardware designers have imbued the ethos of FOSS. Without that I doubt people will share niche techniques like this which have the potential to make lots of money.
It's refreshing to see new techniques/ technologies used with things like metal and glass.
bringing it up only because the techniques seem like they could possibly borrow ideas from one another.