#BuiltInUpverter

The Story

When Andreas Jochum is hit with a problem, he likes to go out and build his own solution. That’s how his custom design and PCB manufacturing company, Nicadrone, came to be when he was fed up with how difficult it was to get his circuit boards produced in Nicaragua. He bought all the necessary equipment to set up a shop and has been cooking up new hardware products for the last year and a half.

Mainly creating for the UAV market, Andreas started working on an ambitious project to develop a lighter, more efficient electric motor than what’s currently available. The project required a special type of power supply which could generate a very strong magnetic field for short bursts of time. When his search for a high voltage power module ended with no affordable results, he simply built his own using Upverter.

Whether it's with my employee or with the rest of the world, Upverter makes it incredibly easy to share my designs.

The high voltage power module is Andreas’ second Upverter project to go on to crowdfunding. His first product, an electropermanent magnet for grabbing cargo, was developed as an open hardware project, allowing anyone to fork and modify the design to best fit their need. This sharing of design files was especially easy and straight-forward with Upverter’s cloud-based technology.

For other design jobs that Nicadrone receives, Andreas has hired an employee who he has taught the basics of electrical engineering to through Upverter. The editor and tools are intuitive to quickly pick up, even for beginners who are just getting started with hardware.

In terms of editing capabilities, Upverter rivals other software packages like OrCAD, but the greatest part about Upverter is its shallow learning curve.

Doing all the manufacturing in-house comes with a number of perks. Nicadrone's process for producing PCBs is highly flexible, allowing for multiple changes of a board in a single day. For revisions, they simply make the necessary tweaks on Upverter, use the Gerber file to print out a mask, expose and develop the board, and it's good to go.

In addition to the new electric motor project, Andreas has plans to develop a wireless charger specific to quadcopters. He intends on making the tools and modules for the project open source so that others could freely use them in their designs.

> Make sure to check out (and support!) Andreas' high voltage power module, currently running its last few days on Kickstarter. For some of his other open hardware designs, visit his Upverter page.