I wanted to publish my thoughts on some things before joining the workforce fulltime. Like many others, I’ll be under a contract where everything I think and create must be reported to and given ownership by the corporate overlords who will be unable to bring instances of the ideas to market (see The Innovator’s Dilemma). While the place I’m going to work for doesn’t fabricate their own chips, but they do do plenty of prototyping, so I’d like to dump some of my ideas, despite them not yet being reduced to practice, before my thoughts belong to someone else. Honestly, I resent the practice and can’t wait to build up enough money to survive on if I found a startup that doesn’t make money for the first five years.
Traces
Probably the most useful next step would be to hone Rhys Jones’s solder deposition methods. It might be useful to explore additional solder types than were covered in his original study, and while these would be pricey, the material properties of indium (low melting point) and silver (better flow) may be worth investigating as potential solutions to the deposition issues. While I’ve yet to come across a strong argument for why depositing solder would be better than etching copper, solder does have safety requirement and cost advantages over milling copper. I suppose working with acid may have more burdensome safety requirements than soldering.
Magnets
So if we can deposit electrically conductive metallic material, why not try depositing magnetic metallic material? Zinc oxide with the proper doping may serve as a useful ferromagnetic material. With it, one could fabricate both the ferromagnetic part of a motor. With conductive material laid out in a way that creates an inductor, one could also create the electromagnetic part of a motor, allowing a RepRap to replicate its own motors!
Forays Into Desktop Fabrication 