DROPTICAL – PRECISION STARTS AT THE DROP LEVEL

It began with a problem, not a business plan. In a development project, the future founding team ran up against the limits of established dosing technology. Any jet dispenser forced a choice between price, size and flexibility – never all three at once. Two engineers with wide experience from customer projects – Jonas Heelein and Matthias Leininger – set out to build their own compact, affordable jet dispenser. The very first prototype of the ClickJet dosing system, made from the lever mechanism of a ring binder, an electromagnet, an Arduino and adhesive tape, already delivered promising results.

Assessing the tiny drops called for a means of measurement, so the team quickly built a first, deliberately simple dropwatcher of its own. From their background in industrial automated inspection systems, the founders knew the cruciality of gap-free process monitoring. As a result, the idea of an extremely miniaturised camera was born. To combine a jet dispenser with an inline camera, they applied for the EXIST start-up grant and brought the third Co-Founder, Daniel Föste, on board. During the funding, the camera was refined for three-dimensional inline drop detection in the tightest of spaces. The inline 3D dropwatcher concept was then filed for a patent. In 2022, droptical GmbH was founded in Nuremberg, Germany.

Originally the dispenser was to be the heart of droptical, with the camera merely a means to qualify the company’s own jetting technology. But the camera took on a momentum of its own. When an investor recognised its potential and pushed its development, the strategic decision was made. Since then the camera has taken centre stage and dropwatching has become the core of the company.

The logic is compelling. Contactless jetting processes – whether industrial jet dispensing or inkjet printing – run at hundreds or thousands of drops per second and cannot be judged with the naked eye. Measuring the individual drop in flight – volume, velocity, flight angle and point of impact – turns a previously blind process into a visible, controllable one. Jetting errors surface not at final inspection but the moment they occur. This is a decisive lever for reducing scrap and ensuring gap-free traceability.

The most fundamental difference lies deeper than the slim housing suggests. Unlike most competitors, droptical does not rely on off-the-shelf industrial cameras. The company developed the entire camera from the ground up, tailored to jetting. That brings several advantages at once. First, an extreme degree of miniaturisation, possible only by dispensing with standard modules. Second, the freedom to choose the ideal image sensor for each task. Third, the strobe light is driven directly by the camera. This is an often underestimated detail that has a major impact. There is no extra connection, no external hardware and the synchronisation of flash and capture is always spot on. This is the prerequisite for razor-sharp, repeatable images of fast-flying drops.

Every droptical dropwatcher is also a self-contained stand-alone system built on the plug-and-play principle. Instead of elaborate laboratory setups, a compact device with an integrated web server suffices. Through an intuitive web interface it is ready within minutes with almost any inkjet printer or jet dispenser. Users across industries benefit wherever the smallest quantities of liquid must be precisely applied. These industries include printing, electronics and printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing, semiconductors, printed electronics and life-science laboratories. Four characteristics form the core of the offering:

Highly Miniaturised – So compact that a complete measurement setup – mechanical mounts included – fits into a handy transport case. In addition, it integrates almost anywhere, from the R&D lab bench to inline positions in series production.

High Performance – Up to 600 real frames per second, 3D drop measurement, automatic video stitching and integrated nozzle monitoring that continuously detects deposits, flight angle and impact area.

Open and Integrable – A documented application programming interface (API) with an open-source sample programme and a transmission control protocol (TCP) server for easy data transmission, allows flexible integration. These aspects make the dropwatcher an attractive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) building block for machine and plant manufacturers.

Affordable – A performance class once reserved for high-priced specialist systems, made affordable through a novel operating principle, a clever choice of components and optimisation for high volumes.

This combination – stand-alone simplicity for the user and deep integrability for the OEM – is the real unique selling point.

“Dropwatching has become the core of the company”

An entire family of cameras has grown up around dropwatching. The starting point and core product was the NanoStrobeX. This is 
an inline precision camera for single nozzle-jetting processes. It immediately detects deviations and errors. This led to the development of further variants. The UltiStrobe is a flexible, universal system 
for all applications and the NanoStrobeX-I, which is specifically designed for very small dispensing gaps. The latest additions are 
the NeoScale which is a camera-based replacement for precision weight scales for machine integration and a Dropwatcher-Array-Camera.

Additional camera systems are in the development pipeline. On the dispensing side – where the story began – is the ClickJet. This is a miniaturised nano- and pico-jet dispenser for low-viscosity liquids with droplet volumes ranging from nanolitres down to a few picolitres.

Compatibility is a top priority. The systems work with all common jet valves from well-known manufacturers. They span applications from research and the laboratory, through to next-to-line integration and 100% inline monitoring.

“An entire family of cameras has grown up around dropwatching”

Today droptical employs around twelve developers at its Nuremberg headquarters, focused firmly on dropwatching. Several product lines are on the market, while others are in the R&D pipeline. The company keeps its structure deliberately lean. Sales are decentralised through a network of specialised partners, letting the team do what it does best – develop technology.

Meanwhile, partners stay close to customers in each market. A multilingual network of premium partners across Europe and Asia carries the systems where they are needed. droptical has a trade-fair presence from Munich, Barcelona, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan to the US. ‘Made in Germany’ remains both a promise of quality and a statement of origin.

“Additional camera systems are in the development pipeline”

droptical has made the leap from contract developer to product-driven technology provider. The company is guided by a conviction often heard in the Nuremberg office – “What does the customer really need?” The result is dosing and monitoring technology that makes precision, traceability and compatibility its benchmark.

The next two articles in future issues go deeper. In the first, examination of the technology behind the droptical dropwatcher will be discussed in detail. The second – a customer case study – shows what the systems achieve in industrial practice.