Surface Slicer

Software Tool for Planning Circuit
for Aersol Jet Additive Manufacturing

The Aerosol Jet Additive Manufacturing technology allows for precise deposition of different materials in a three-dimensional space. An application of this technology is the printing of integrated circuits onto the surface of three-dimensional objects. However, the existing methods for creating 3D circuits generally require the manual design of circuit traces using computer-aided design (CAD) software. This process is laborious and impedes the quick development of prototypes. The objective of this project is to develop software capable of efficiently converting pre-existing 2D PCB designs onto a corresponding 3D object. The software is capable of determining the transformation between a 2D PCB design and a desired 3D surface, and generating waypoints or motions for printing. We showcase the software's robustness and adaptability through a range of circuit design demos.
* Since this work is still under active development, source code is not publicly available.

Method

A. The input PCB design (in gerber format) is parsed into 2D printing trajectory as waypoints.

B. The input 3D surface (in stl format) analyzed and a transformation to 2D is calculated.

C. The 2D circuit waypoints is layed onto the 2D surface, and the inverse transformation is applied to bring the circuit waypoints to 3D.

D. The 3D waypoints is analyzed and printing motion for the Aersol Jet machine is calculated.

Sensor Circuit on Hand

Hand Model Sensor Circuit

Animation of Circuit Printing on Hand

Blinker Circuit on Mechnical Part

Part Model Blinker Circuit

Animation of Circuit Printing on Part

Animation of Printing

Printing the Continents on a Globe

Continents Outline Mapped to a Globe

Animation of Printing on Globe

Project Presentation

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Contact

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Lehong Wang