Interview with Alroy Almeida of Voltera

2016-04-05 | By Maker.io Staff

What led you to start Voltera?

The company started in back in 2013. My co-founders and I had just completed Mechatronics and Nanotechnology programs at the University of Waterloo, which is one of the biggest and best engineering schools here in Canada. One of the things that sets this school apart is that you have six internships throughout the five-year program. That led us to have a really wide background by the time we hit the workforce, so we had experience in everything from robotics and automation, firmware, hardware design, and industrial electronics testing.

A problem that we noticed in the industry was that no matter where we were, we kept running into the same problem; we would design a circuit, send it off to China to get fabricated, wait a few weeks, and when we received it back, we would realize that we had made a mistake. This happened over and over. We didn’t have the money as students to be able to spend that much on board design and testing. Back then, 3D printing was really hitting its stride, so we thought we could do the same things with electronics.

While we were still in school, we began working on the idea that would evolve into Voltera:  rapid prototyping of PCBs. The University of Waterloo has a fantastic program called Velocity that helps startups get on their feet with mentorships, office space, and facilities to use. Another aspect of the program is a business plan competition, and we competed in that and won a good sum of money to help us get the company started.

What were the challenges in developing this process?

Conductive inks have been around for over a decade now and they are only now just reaching a point where they are commercially viable for our application. There have been other people that have attempted to do something like this—developing a prototyping tool using conductive inks—but they have usually been with high-volume projects.

Mainly, what started us off was that we took the same route as everyone else, which was the idea of an InkJet that uses conductive inks.  While it did work, it still needed better conductivity and solderability, and fortunately, my team is brilliantly smart.  They’ve improved the tech a lot since these humble beginnings.

Once it came time to look towards manufacturing and how we could build it using a scalable process, we knew we had to make a big change.  We moved the business to China and went there as part of the HAXLR8R, which helped us leverage their resources and get a thorough understanding of what it takes to manufacture a product.

What types of circuits could you make with your device?

We print down to 8 mil trace pitch.  It’s more of a prototyping tool, not anything that is high volume or high-complexity. Right now, the majority of the things we have been printing have been fairly simple mainly because we have been focused on building the tool and not the boards with it. We have printed things like Arduino clones and simple 5x5 circuits and those basic, hobbyist-level things because a lot of our target customers are in the maker industry and academia.

The machine you are offering has a print head, a solder paste dispenser and a reflow, which is impressive to put in one machine. What is the process of going from the solder paste to the reflow?

Right now, the printer is going to be shipping with three print heads: the conductive ink, insulating ink, and solder paste. It is really a two-application tool. The first is the printing of circuit boards for very early stage designs—we can lay down the conductive ink, we can create these masks with the insulating ink, and we can create a second conductive material on top.

The second application is that it serves as a solder paste dispenser and reflow. During the small batch prototyping stage, you usually want to get 10-20 boards made to build up data units or internal testing. At such small volumes, you are not going to want to pay for labor-intensive assembly shops. All the user needs to do is hand the Gerber files to the printer and it will handle the solder paste dispensing for them. Once that is done, the user hits the reflow button on the software and the print platform of the printer is actually a heating bed, which serves as a hotplate for reflow.

We wanted the device to help with multiple stages of the process. If someone were to have this and all it did was print circuit boards and didn’t help with any other part of development, it’s not very helpful at all. We wanted it to help people no matter what stage of prototyping they are in so that they can get to high-volume production much faster.

Tell us about the Kickstarter campaign for your device? How did it go and what was your response to it?

The Kickstarter was way more successful out of the gate than we could have ever imagined. We had set a goal of $70,000 and we hit that within 35 minutes, tripled that within 24 hours, and now we are closing in on 700% funding. We are doing exceptionally well and we are very happy about that. What sparked that was we were fortunate enough to be at CES this year and everybody there is building hardware, so if you are ever going to meet people that understand the need for this, it was at CES. We met a lot of people that had tons of ideas that we haven’t even thought of and people that wanted to buy them right there on the spot, so we had a lot of great interactions with potential customers.