Adding Materials

For all 4 prints we’ll be using the same materials. The provided Black Screen Printing Ink and Introduction to NOVA FR4 substrate.

Both of these materials were supplied with NOVA.

Any ink can be used for this project. And if the supplied FR4 board is used up you can use this PDF to print the exercises onto a sheet of PET. If you’re printing onto a sheet of PET, use the vacuum module to mount the substrate rather than the rigid mounting hardware.

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Adding Materials

To add our ink and substrate to our materials library we’ll select the MATERIALS workflow from the home screen of NOVA’s software.

In the MATERIALS workflow you’ll see two options. On the left is your LIBRARY, this is where all your material settings are stored to be used during prints and new materials can be added. On the right is the EXPLORE tile, this is where materials that Voltera has already calibrated in house can be accessed. These materials can easily be added to your library along with all the required settings so you don't need to calibrate them.

All materials settings are stored to your user account.

We’ll start by adding our substrate, the FR4 board. To do this we’ll select the EXPLORE option:

Within the EXPLORE tab find the FR4 substrate and select it to view its details. Then click the Add to device button to add it to our materials Library.

Then click the View in Library option, this will automatically navigate from the Explore section over to your Library. We can now find FR4 in our materials library along with its preset settings

Next we’ll add our ink. We can do this by either clicking the + button at the bottom of the material library bar or the CREATE button on the Library home screen if no material is selected.

This will bring up a form where we can fill in all the relevant information about the material we’re adding. For our Speedball Screen-Printing Test Ink we’ll use the following information then click CREATE:

Name:	Test Ink
Batch Name:	Nordson 150 (this will appear once we set the category as a paste)
Type:	Paste
Subtype:	Black
Notes:	A black Speedball screen printing ink paired with a Nordson 150µm Nozzle for testing.

If you know what nozzle type and size you will be using this is a helpful thing to use as the batch name for your material. Each paste setting you create will be specific to the nozzle size you calibrate the material with. Using the batch name as the nozzle identifier can allow you to organize settings for multiple nozzle options under one material.

The ink will now be added to the library with some default settings. But don’t worry about that, in Print 1 will be dialing in these settings using the Calibrate workflow.

We’re now ready to move onto the next step.