Great tip thanks! Same old problem where its best for single layer (single sided) board, but certainly should be great for prototyping small simple boards. (And limits bey9ond that are likely shakiness making medium density surface mount hard.. like TQFP packages and so on.) But seriously cool project -- looks fun, and looks handy. Very tempting! Thanks a lot!

A little CNC machine would be pretty slick for that .. a CNC and a 3d printer are nearly the same.. one is subtractive, one is additive.. buy thery're "just" x-y-z tables; make an x-y-z and hang a dremel off the carriage instead of an extruder, and you've got a CNC that can carve out PCBs. But as always, the problem with PCBs is.. vias; you can do one sided boards easy, but two sided, with via's.. plating and drilling/lining-up is a drag :) Some filament is conductive, so the theory is about 3d printing the traces, which may work; not practical or cost effective right now (when you can submit a 4" square pcb design to Elecrow and get 10 of them for $10 .. thats hard to beat.)

I call it 'dollar store value'; for something about the size of a VHS tape, chess piece (Dalek pieces!) or smaller (er, like 6" square sort of thing) its about break even or cheaper to print it out; if its at all large, its cheaper to just buy it at the dollar store or whatever. You want to make a little box to hold screws? Buy it at the dollar store. You want to make a custom designed thing for your pegboard, or a case for a model car, or whatever.. well, perfect. Of course, if its a self designed thing, the printer is invaluable; you can design somethign, print it out, refine it, print it again. Its amazing. --> I've made a tricopter (liek a quadcopter, but no extra rubbish motors :) So if you are a creative type, who doesn't mind learning to CAD (open source stuff), its fantastic. If you don't have time to CAD, you're relying on existing models to print.. check out sitrs like Thingiverse to see whats out there. If you want to mass produce stuff cheap, its currently the wrong game. Good for makers, not so good for consumers.

I had a long laundry list of issues, but many ewere game _Design_ and not the usual rants about bugs. PVP? There were no real 'enemies' estabnlished; you can be an an open pvp server, which means free for all .. no goal or reason, just people ganking randomly (usually when you were talking to NPCs due to the really bad design of zoom while chatting, and the fact they couldnt' code enough to put an if-statement to disable gank-while-zoomed). Anyway, there needs to be 'war' of some sort designed in, or its just boring. More to point though.. instancing. ITs not an open world.. its a bubble world, with bubbles here or there. Hell, at launch people under ataack could just switch instances and vanish, which killed the whole 'designed for PVP' idea. But its somethign unfixable .. the world is not wide and open and explorable, its a bunch of bubbles with hyperlinks. *MEH* I just assume they've implemented stats and gear and tried to normalize it all, but I could never go back for the lack of PVP design, and lack of real open world feal. We dont' go to MMORPGs for a small world. We go to them for a big immersive world we can walk end to end in. jeff

Ignoring the enormous benefits of a single codebase for Windows, Linux/BSD and Mac OSX of course. (Yes, people still make applications for desktops and notebooks .. not just netbooks, PDAs/smartphones)