Breadboards are great, but as the world moves more and more to having SMD as a standard, prototyping straight PCBs is becoming more common. If you’re mailing off to China for your PCBs, it’s shockingly quick for what it is, but a one-week turnaround is not “rapid prototyping”. [Stephen Hawes] has been on a quest on his YouTube channel for the ideal rapid-prototyping PCB solution, and he thinks he’s finally got it.

Now, if you’re only doing single-layer PCBs, this is a solved problem. You can mechanically mill, or laser cut, or chemically etch your way to PCB perfection, far faster than the Chinese fabs can get you a part. If you want a double-sided board, however, vias are both a pain in the keister to do yourself, and a rate-limiting step.

[Stephen Hawes] hit on the idea of buying a bulk set of PCBs from the usual vendors. The boards will be simple copper pours with vias in a grid with just a bit of etching. PCB Vendors are good at that, after all, and it’s not going to cost much more than raw copper. [Stephen] then uses the template of this “viagrid” board to lay out the circuit he’s prototyping, and it’s off to the races.

Or, off to the laser, rather. Unlike the fiber laser he showed us previously, [Stephen] is now recommending a diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) laser, as they can blast the copper off without burning FR4 substrate. Given that the vias are now part of the design, everything needs to line up perfectly, so his viagrid PCB design has a few features to lock it in using LightBurn’s “frame” feature. The DPSS laser barely shows up on the copper, but shines brilliantly off the fiberglass, and VIGrid takes advantage of this fact. He’s also got a 3D printed jig to hold everything in alignment once it’s dialed in, even for running off many boards.

This laser is just as fast as the fiber laser, giving you PCBs in minutes. And while vias are apparently best left to the professionals, through-hole components can easily be accommodated, with the laser able to cut the FR4 on request. All of his lightburn and files for the varigrid PCB are available on GitHub. [Stephen] is also looking for collaborators to see if this technique can be used without the very-expensive Commarker laser, and to come up with a better name than varigrid.

As [Stephen] says in the video, if you combine this with a pick-and-place and a reflow oven, you can go from design to a working two-layer PCB in about 90 minutes, which is a very exciting prospect for engineering companies and maker-spaces alike. Words like “game-changing” get thrown around a lot, but this just might warrant it, at least for those who have a need for speed and can afford the tools.

What do you think? Is viagrid the rapid-prototyping revolution we’ve been waiting for, or is the headline of this article still subject to Betteridge’s Law?

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip.