EFORGE - SCAM

[piotrva]

Hi Dave!

Recently I was bombarded on Facebook with advertisements of: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eforge/eforge-3d-print-electronics-on-demand

It would be nice if you would do a debunking video - as it seems to try to convince people you can do things like diodes and transistors PRINTED...

All the best from Poland, Europe, World

[thm_w]

Forget about ordering photo/solars, PN diodes, PNP/NPN transistors and amplifier circuits. Utilize eForge filaments to print whatever you need, right when you need it.

Oh damn I'm out of 1N4007's, better just print one!
Dave is going to love this.

[Whales]

Our 6 patented filaments include: Conductive, Insulative, Capacitive, Resistive, N-Type Semi-conductive and P-Type Semi-conductive properties. They have been developed after years of university research and initial funding from NASA. These materials are incredibly unique and can only be printed with the eForge printer which incorporates the properly engineered elements needed to print functional electronics.

If this is possible then it would be fucking amazing.  Stuff the printer, this would be the center of what they're trying to sell.  There would also need to be a lot more detail on what size, layup & performance of transistors they can make.

Sidenote: printing capacitors and even diodes is doable (see my website RE macro/hand-scale devices ), the devil for those is in performance (lifetime, impedence, Vdrop, capacitance, reverse blockage).  Transistors however are a whole other world, from everything I have read you need tight dimensional tolerances for the active regions to work & be repeatable.

[xrunner]

Damn eight extruders with all different temps and materials? 

And I thought mine was fussy at times with one nozzle and PLA ... 

[saurus]

Maybe not a scam but certainly not convincing me at all.

Normally what I look for in Kickstarter projects is the timeline, that reveals if real engineering has gone into this..
- they say the idea to print electronics has born in Apr 2015 ...not really, the idea was around way before that, in fact the Voxel8 was already trying to do that before that date.
- it's unclear what happened between Apr 2015 and Oct 2018, but it seems to me it was mostly an application/review process for NASA funding
- design started in Oct 2018, so they want us to believe that in just 1 year they developed a printer with 8 extruders, that is capable of the incredible smooth prints (some arguably impossible for an FDM printer) that they show in the video and they were also able to get advanced electronic functionality printed? (look at the luminescence example with all that grid pattern printed perfectly with no supports) ...then compare that to is an actual print of the capacitance sensor. I'm pretty sure the prints shown in the video didn't come from the efroge printer.
- considering the claims they are making, the NASA collaboration and that according to their timeline they have the 'final' firmware ready, you'd think they have plenty of examples (and test data) of functional electronic prints, but yet if you read the comments section they haven't even any data about the conductivity of printed material!!, they plan to test this now!! Also according to the comments, anything more advanced than a conductive strip is still just a plan. Let alone the printed flying drone they show in the video LOL
- so far the only printed 'functional' item they have is that capacitive touch sensor, which really just needs a slightly conductive area!! They announce this as a 'major breakthrough' just now, however the next item on their timeline, next month, is tooling, which would mean the design is already fully tested and finalized.

I think they really made a 3D printer with 8 exturders (which if it prints with good quality is already an achievement for 1 year's worth of design work, but I don't really buy into that either) and they are just hoping that they can eventually get some electronic functionality by using specialized materials. But it seems very clear to me that they have no idea if this will be able to create any electronic functionality apart maybe from basic 'conductive' traces (which is trivial). The timeline is certainly not convincing me at all.

I'm sure some day this will be a reality though.