Video Hand-Drawn and Inkjet Printed Circuits for the Masses (Video) 33
A little cursory Google searching will soon lead you to other companies selling into the home/prototype circuit board market, including Cartesian Co and their Argentum 3-D printer that does prototype and short-run PCBs and only costs $899 (on special at the time this was written) and Electroninks, which markets the Circuit Scribe pen and associated materials with an emphasis on education. There are others in this growing field, and a year from now there will probably be more of them, all working to replace the venerable breadboard the same way electronic calculators replaced slide rules.
Timothy Lord for Slashdot : What is on the table in front of you?
Yuki Nishida : Okay sounds good. So like we are showing like the tools to make a circuit just like drawing, like we have a special marker that contains silver conductive ink and by drawing like the same as a regular marker like you are drawing turns to be a circuit by using battery and light that lights up like this way and this is a very simple one but once you understand you can draw like more like with more design like this, this, also combining with like the card _____00:31 it looks like this way and also another thank you card like lying here.
Slashdot: What is the most complex circuit you have made with it?
Yuki: So the most complex circuit I made is like the circuit that contains more than 20 lines in parallel, that is called parallel circuit in physics, but once you understand the concept and think about the layout, that's not so difficult to design.
Slashdot: What is the origin of this? How did this come to be made?
Yuki: So like our technical adviser has been researching on those conductive inks, and like we found an ink that works pretty quickly and easily on those like paper. And then, like, we found that this can be used for like education, also like creative works to express more creativity by using circuits. Then like we decided to go like why don’t we make a product so that more people can use, access to the circuit and make their own work, like in a new way, like combining with the circuits.
Slashdot: Now you pointed you can make some pretty complex parallel circuits, but they all only have one point of actual switching, is that right?
Yuki: Yeah, so for those even for there, we make one point on the switch like this, like just touching one point, but now also we have like some examples like imagining that there is a couple of switches, two points together and that works. We made a sound 3’ x 3’ like the poster, that comes with our circuit, all the lights were drawn and all lights and circuits were drawn with our pen, and that’s pretty huge, but that works like bring couple of circuits together.
Slashdot: Can you show us the package itself, the finished version here?
Yuki: Sure.
Slashdot: This is what was funded by your Kickstarter project?
Yuki: Yes, we ran the Kickstarter like about a year ago, like we launched at the last year’s South by Southwest and then we ran the Kickstarter, successfully funded, raised $80,000 and now we today are now going to sell the kit that contains pen, special paper, also like bundling with some batteries and lights together. Also we offer the packages that you can print the circuits, with a home inkjet printer that you can find on Amazon.
Slashdot: Now one thing I understand that you have now in development is an eraser.
Yuki: Oh yeah, yes, so like we also like developed the eraser. The eraser that you can edit while your draw instantly, like this is we developed this like basically finding that the children, they start mistaking the circuit and they want to fix it, and by using eraser like they can fix, also learn what happened and they can keep going and making more creative stuff easily without losing the interest.
Slashdot: Since you don’t need a starter to make the new circuits, how do you actually attach these tiny LEDs, the smallest LEDs I have seen?
Yuki: So like we have very tiny LEDs used today, so just pick out with the tape and tape down the paper. That’s how we do that.
Slashdot: Instead of tweezers or something?
Yuki: Yeah, so I mean you don’t need to use tweezers, actually you don’t have a tweezers, just pick up with tape, and just attach on paper, that’s it.
The breadboard isn't going away anytime soon... (Score:3)
The nice thing about the breadboard is that you can work on one project, and either keep it, or yank the components off and put something different.
Even a short run device that allows one-off PCBs means that if stuff needs modified, the PCB needs to be tossed and a new one made.
I would give this device a place in the lab, but for the original product development, the breadboard will still be king. However, for testing an appliance, being able to one-off custom PCBs... especially multilayered ones... is quite useful.
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I'm waiting for the "Akira absorbs systemd" story.
Trace resistance (Score:4, Informative)
One of the biggest problems with these systems is the trace resistance. Silver ink has in every case so far been orders of magnitude higher in resistance than a small copper trace effectively making these systems useless for anything that carries power. I'm not talking about big power either, simply powering several micros, a few logic chips and a couple of relays on a circuit is enough to bring the current up that you can't just run everything in the same trace.
I predict lots of people will set fire to their projects.
Trace reactance, too. (Score:2)
Just because the R in RC is distributed like this doesn't mean it's not real. All of the usual board-level capacitances are real, too, so long traces simply won't carry fast clocked signals cleanly.
We aready have this (Score:1)
It's called etching. You take a copper clad board, print the resist pattern onto it (usually by a photo resist process, but you can do it directly using a printer if you have one) then you etch off the exposed copper. Volia, you have a circuit card. Two layers are fairly easy, and if you need more than 2 layers (which is LIKELY for most digital boards of moderate complexity) you can send off the data to a board manufacturer and have your prototype board back in a few weeks, etched, layered, drilled, stuf
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Given today's bent towards surface mount, which comes with a whole new garage full of expensive equipment to really do the right way, it is just better to send your boards out to a third party to be etched, drilled, stuffed and soldered.
We've been doing some prototyping in my lab. I've been trained on old-school point-to-point prototypes. They work very well, are usually pretty good models for actual performance, and when its all said and done, take just about as much time as anything else.
My employee, a younger fellow, built a prototype with a breadboard. Egad, I remember those from undergraduate years, and how much I hated them. I spent more time debugging that mess of wires than it would have taken to build it point-to-point from th
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I solder SMT components by hand as well. Don't even need a microscope; just head-mounted magnifier glasses is plenty. Make sure you have good light and plenty of flux and you're good to go.
But the problem is the board. Sure, if you have a finished design already, and you intend to actually use it in the future, then sending off for a finished PCB is good. But if it's just a hobby, and you're prototyping or just playing around to better understand a particular circuit, then spending a good chunk of money and
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Yeah, soldering SMT is not that hard, at least for the larger packages and pitches. The no-lead stuff is hard without specialized tools, but with a decent iron, flux, good light, and a loupe you can accomplish a lot.
My strategy is to prototype on a breadboard, and use breakout boards for the SMT components. Then when the design has been thoroughly tested, design a PCB that either accepts the larger SMT stuff directly, or accepts the breakout boards. Requires lots of care in design, and all my projects have
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Lots of flux is important. We found that using just gobs and gobs of it, made for really pretty easy soldering that avoided solder bridges and reliably gave us beautiful connections. And by gobs and gobs, I mean enough that the leads are submersed. Naturally, that much of it needs to be cleaned up afterwards, but some alcohol and a toothbrush works well. I worry a little about the flux that gets trapped under each IC, though.
However, when we, on occasion, needed to remove some components, especially ICs
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Yep, I remember as a kid building a crystal radio with my dad, and he used a photo-resist etching solution to build the pcb. The end result was pretty damn pro. I still have that radio, 30 years later, and it works great.
Old news (Score:2)
Hate to rain on this guy's parade, but conductive ink pens have already been for sale for quite some time [farnell.com]. If he wants to reinvent the wheel, enjoy. Quite honestly, this looks amateuristic, so gefundenes Fressen for artists and "installations", I guess. Sorry for being so negative, it just feels unfair sometimes that hardware designers working their ass of to get you all these nice fancy iGadgets are rarely held in high esteem, while "artists" can "invent" something old, build something trivial (20 lights