U-W team wins school's first James Dyson Award

For the first time ever students from the University of Waterloo have won the James Dyson Award.

Four University of Waterloo students are the international winner of the 2015 James Dyson Award for their work in developing a custom circuit board printer. Alroy Almeida says the team is very excited to be recognized for their work.

The Voltera V-One wins the team $54,000, while the university department receives $9,000.

The Voltera V-One is a prototyping system that prints circuit boards within minutes. Voltera V-One lays down conductive and insulating inks to create a functional, 2-layer circuit board.

Jesús Zozaya, co-founder, says in a statement “We’re at a critical point with Voltera V-One. Our parts are being manufactured in China and we are doing further testing at our office and our assembly line in Canada. The $54,000* we’ve been awarded as winners of the James Dyson Award will help us to ramp up production.”

The Voltera V-One team is made up of four graduates from the University of Waterloo. They include 3 Mechatronic Engineer Graduates; 25 year old Zozaya, 25 year old Alroy Almeida, 24 year old James Pickard and Katrina IIic who is a graduate of Nanotechnology Engineering.

The team raised half a million dollars on kickstarter in early 2015. It has an assembly line in Waterloo and is due to begin shipping machines soon.