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Circuits Everywhere
cpk0 writes "ABCNews is reporting on a small, New York based company that is now using and creating a technique of printing circuits directly onto paper with conductive inks. The uses up to this point are somewhat trivial, but the idea is undeniably exciting, and the article outlines some of the future ideas T-Ink Inc. has for this technology." Including electronic candy, oddly enough. Update: 10/27 17:24 GMT by T : Associated Press Technology Editor Frank Bajak points out that this story comes from The Associated Press, which deserves the credit.
Hardwarez?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
For those interested, this company sells this technology for home use for over 15 years already.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Surely we've seen this before. Electrical engineers have been using those metal pens for years. Honestly, with this method you still need a specialized printer. A conductive ink wouldn't be any better then say, a printed metal circuit. If the cost of a cartridge of ink for my HP is any indication, it wouldn't be cheaper either!
Then we will really see some novel uses for this stuff.
You could combine this with electronic ink and have a fingerprint verification system built into a piece of paper, and then if it isn't activated by a verified fingerprint, you can't read the contents... the possibilities for this are interesting.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.
Widespread adoption of RFID tags is being delayed by cost. Though much of it is due to the chip, which can't be printed, printing the antenna part could help bring the total price down.
I mean, what good is a circuit without components? It's be half interesting if I draw a diode and the 'conductive ink' actually soldered a diode on the 'paper'. This thing is just for the circuit board.
Much ado about less than nothing, IMO.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Could the same be done with Tatoos using conductive ink?
Could perhaps make an interesting component of a digital ID scheme. Of course one would need one on the forhead and one on the right hand.
13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelations...
Notice mark "in" forehead or hand - most likely a reference to RFID chips. Woooo!
Pr0n magazines that moan when you stroke the pictures!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
The uses up to this point are somewhat trivial
Trivial? Just wait until you see my bookshelf beowulf!
Some bloke found that you could print the patterns using a laser printer and the tomer was conductive enough for the purpose.
Of course you probably need something a bit more conductive to make useful PCBs. I guess you could do something wierd like electroplating the toner.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The question is not 'can you put out a press release', more 'can you do something useful and get it to market'.
I think the uses for this stops when you're thinking of building anything large out of it, simply because of the clumsiness of paper (and the obviously incineration ;) )
A few years back, didn't the same company promise us paper cell phone and laptops that were disposable and going to come in happy meals? Or was that someone else?
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
If you are printing on Fabric, then you can get interactive clothing, that does all sorts of stupid stuff when you move. In Tokyo they'd sell like Hotcakes!
Insofar as bubblejet circut printing goes, the circuts would have to be huge to account for the drift in the paper feed mechanisms...
#define DRM chmod 000
I made printed circuits almost 20 years ago by drawing patterns with a lead (graphite) pencil. I made a resister network for a static charge meter this way. It used a calculator LCD display as a bar graph. India ink (carbon black in water with a little gum arabica) is also conductive and can be used to draw circuits. I've also had to threaten an engineer that was writing comments on prototype circuit boards. The ink from his marker was weakly conductive and making intermittant glitches. I hadn't thought about this in a long time - may be time to dust off some of those old circuit designs and re-create them on a paper circuit board with surface-mount components and conductive ink. There are plenty of conductive glues (and home brew compounds) that could be used as "solder". With appropriate insulating glues one could even do multi-layer "boards".
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Why would drift be a problem? As long as things match up on a small scale, everything should work fine.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
It's called a "printed circuit board" because it was originally made by printing the metal on a substrate. The process of etching the copper clad boards was a later innovation, but the name stuck.
Jason
ProfQuotes
"Ohhh, fuck, I shreded my computer!"
because you have to put components on the paper you bloody retard. If the pads don't line up, you're in trouble. why don't you think occasionally you mindless slashdot drone?
Yeah, I think your right. I remember something about that.
I remember these babies from a few years back. Here is another.
Depends, if its something you could just pop into your inkjet and print out a circuit, I dont see how thats trivial at all. On the other hand, if its some $10k printer..then BAH to them! :D
Maybe i'll RTFA
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
This ink has nothing in common with the one used to repair TV remotes.
P.S. You might want to talk to a psychologist about that anger problem you have. Too much stress can give you a heart attack, you know.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
As somebody who works with soldering more than he wants to - I can tell you that paper isn't such a impossible item to solder onto (provided that the conductive ink bonds to solder)
Anyhoo - if you don't go crazy with the heat, paper doesn't even char. Going with 450 degrees (celcius here) will char your paper if you leave the tip on long enough, but due to the high heat-insulation properties of paper, you should never need to do it in the first place.
The problem is actually the heat-insulation property: molten solder does not solidify half as fast on paper as they do on PCB. Of course, this comes back to the "go easy on the temperature dial" thing mentioned earlier, but if not careful it can be annoying. It is even half fun to drip some molten solder on a sheet of paper - you can roll it around while it's liquid (This is, without saying, dangerous - so perform at your own risk).
So, I don't see this being terribly problematic. Print multiple sheets and use rivets as via will get you multi-layered circuits. Of course - I wouldn't expect the traces to be beautiful 50-ohm lines, but I doubt you will be putting any 10GHz serdes chips on there either, eh?
p.s. use of surface mount components will be HIGHLY recommended.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Oh spare me your bombastic pomposity, you knob-knuckled, change
jingling, bulbous lipped, shulgus wearing, furled guinous. Just stop
speaking. Nothing escapes your drooling, gaping maw but gibberish, you
are unintelligible, your sense went swirling away with the rinse
cycle.
You have no business interacting with the conscious, your very
presence gives monkeys headaches. I can't believe that diminuitive,
dried up peach pit that rattles around in the space where a normal
human's brain should be is able to direct your palsied and wasted
limbs to achieve locomotion.
Your very personage is abhorrent to see in daylight. You ears are
blue-veined and freakish horrors of aerodynamics, your forehead has
creases so deep they are a haven for unclassified flora and fauna of
mysterious origin.
Each wheezing breath you take uses oxygen that by rights would be
better utilized by an autistic chimpanzee, and each exhalation fouls
the air with so vile a stench as to bring birds crashing down dead
from defoliated trees.
You wompler, you fraldersnash, you eater of curried laundry lint. You
have the audacity to daily inflict your existence on the innocent
people of this planet. HOW can you stand to be you?
The only other consequence I could imagine would be to couple this technology with AI, then I'd guess we could get some self-expanding hardware machine...
I'm not sure about you, but I don't think I want my toilet paper to have AI.
Barney: Circuits! Circuits everywhere!
Moe (?): You gettin' ready for Ciruits Day, Barney?
Barney: Circuits Day? What's Circuits Day?
On my linux box, both mozilla and konqueror hang while opening the article http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20031026_712.html.
Does the article open in windows IE?
If this just consists of some integrated circuit, then whether it "thinks" or not is not that important, you'll be wiped the same way...
Now, if this also has some mechanical abilities, then I'd for sure rather use something else (check for chapter 1.XIII)...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
McDonald's here in Australia have been using T-Ink on their traymats and Happy Meal boxes for over a year now.
Get some new news.
Whilst everyone is all like 'omg I had a conductive pen when i was in grade school', we should probably point out that, this is not the same thing. Your conductive ink pen from radio shack, or your lead pencil, whilst worked great for your 'my 1st polarity tester' circuit are not fantastic materials for modern circuits.
;)
The old etching process that is common place now for PCB fabrication has to be totally monitored, controlled and QA'ed to death to achieve the results required by modern PCB designs.
Paper PCBs aren't really hot news anymore, the ink and company have been pedaling this idea for a whiles now. But you have to see the good sides, for one thing no matter how clean a PCB shop is, they make a hell of alot of bad chemicals worse during the process. If the acid baths, solder lines and the hell on earth glue they use get obsoleted it won't be soon enough.
That all said, and rather off topic, I think we are seeing less and less PCB design happening these days. FPGAs have come of age and now offer gate counts high enough to make them useful for more than a just bunch of glue logic in a single package. Look out for new PCBs where all the complex and exciting stuff is packed away in a single little chip with only a half dozen supporting components and headphone socket attached to that paper PCB
This ink as it stands can't carry enough current to be useful for much butlow power toys. It's an old idea seeing some new use. Futher work will make it more useful but it needs some big break throughs. My conductive pen ( a real conductor that could handle some current )is a life saver.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
FYI: that link leads to a 1.8MB text
this 'stuff that matters' reminds us of the associated press' (AP) 'take' on technology.
for several daze now, their only headline/.storIE was something about talking (to yOUR) police cars?
so as to convey, that there's nothing happening, & we're just waiting for the phonIE felonious payper liesense ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys softwar gangster stock markup FraUD execrable, to tell US what to do/buy.
well, that's not what's happening at all. tell 'em robbIE?
In Australia, McDonald's produced Finding Nemo themed Happy Meal boxes which came with a toy plastic fish. When the fish was placed on some bubbles on the top of the box and the user touched the bubbles on the side (which connected to the top ones), the fish made noises and/or lit up (I believe it depended which character you got). This used T-ink - AFAIK it's the first time it's been used in Australia. Has anyone else seen it being used for similar purposes?
Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.
So in the future, as my newspaper is sending my bio-information back to the publisher to be re-sold in a database to a third pary - bio-information that it has "read" by me handling the conductive print and interrupting the magnetic field (thus being able to track my pulse etc), will I be able to hack it by tearing the paper to destroy the RFID antenna?
I'm sure that there will be plenty of useful and entertaining uses for this technology, but The Diamond Age is coming.
but I hope the ink is fairly cheap, as an offset printer I can assure you that spoilage would be high, low spots, hickeys, anything that could be a problem in regular offset, would be magnified in such a precision image. I suppose the paths could be wider since we're talking 8-1/2 x 11", but...
Mmmm.. Accella..
I feel.. acellerated
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Given the prevalence of flashing banner ads on the web, there's an unescapable irony in reading "Our goal is a total print medium where your paper is going to talk." followed by the comment "For now, the technology is available in limited form and in somewhat trivial applications."
So instead of a medium that could take on the form of a PBS documentary, or have the ability to listen to a Peter Jennings voice narrate the text while we're having coffee, we're going to get something more resembling the Fox News meets Entertainment Tonight, or maybe a Scrubbing Bubbles Bathroom Cleanser commercial?
And I wonder how much more we'll all be paying to read our newspapers? Or for those of us pining for the Good Old Days, how much the "Premium Service" newsprint edition will be cost us?
T-Ink was the supplier for a natty little thing on McDonald's's latest spate of Happy Meals here Down Under.
Two wavy lines of T-Ink in conjuction with a capacitance circuit in the Happy Meal toy left myself and fellow diners puzzled (firstly to get it to work, and later on HOW it worked) for upwards of an hour!
G
All we need now is N-doped ink and P-doped ink to print semiconductors on to the paper. Add a higher resistance ink (for resistors), couple of grades of insulator ink (one for creating capacitors and the other for cross-overs), and a magnetic ink (for creating inductors) and you can create all manner of circuits. While we are at it, we might as well use inks that lead to OLEDs for nice light-emitting properties.
The only problem: our printed semicondutors will be exposed to light and so the circuit may change behavior in sunlight.... better add a basic black ink to the system (or make the insulator ink also be opaque).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Combine T-ink with E-ink and you have a playing card that is like a little nintendo... Or Better yet, all those trading card games could REALLY interact with a "player".. so you lay down your cards and they literally store hitpoints and such, or special moves/rules/ etc.
meh
You what?
GPL is good, because it means that everyone gets access to your source code.
If you create GPLed software in-house, you don't have any obligation to release it outside your organisation. If, however, you want to share it with anyone, you have to share it with everyone. What's unfair about that? Not sharing is, after all, a form of theft.
Really, do you think the original hebrew / aramaic was exactly like that?
Besides, I thought all of the end of the world types thought the social security number was the mark of the beast. After all, a godless liberal named Frank Roosevelt invented the system.
This is my sig.
I attended a presentation a few months ago about a company that used ink jet technologies to print with molten solder (and a few other metals IIRC). I can't remember the name of the company, but the tech was pretty slick.
Great, now the design on my T-shirt will be a circuit to connect all the RFID tags in my clothing into one super Grid wearable computer that phones home and tells Ashcroft where I am and what I'm doing at all times. Perfect!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
finds out about it.
paper stealth airplanes are just around the corner.
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
I'm sure that the technology will be replicated and sold to the more unscrupulous people of this planet who could then know how much money you have on you.
Hmmm...he's only got $10, but this guy on the other hand has $150, let's go mug him.
I am NaN
As an electrical engineer hobbiest this is very intruiging. If I can just print a test ciruit board and keep trying new modles and 'debugging' I'd save a lot, assuming that the ink cost is low enough.
-Tim Louden
A lot of people discussing the benefits/drawbacks of circuits on paper. I am just wondering though, would it not be possible to print to thin paper-like substances, but something not made from pulped-dead-tree. Are there any plasticy substances you can print to? I know that inkjets used to be friendly to some forms of overhead-projector sheets (the transparent ones), how about lasers?
Would any of these make a better medium for circuits?
Oh, and I think this would be even more useful on a photocopier. Just dry/print a diagram of a circuit, and use the copier to product them in functional format.
i-candy, of course.
Way to steal the headline from Fark.
I'm not one to cry over things like this, but it's happening with surprising regularity these days. What follows is pathetic wallowing in my own tears. I'm just going to blurt out all my ideas so I can do a "see, I said it back then". I claim no originality in these ideas, as it's obvious many people come up with them independently. In the open-source spirit of things, anyone should feel free to use these ideas.
..." until you highlight the object you're interested in. "Zoom" and you see Mars change from a glimmering star to a full red orb which the wonderful Celestia allows you to circle around. The passive script would be to auto-highlight "interesting" objects, or perhaps timely phenomena, with 3D models regularly downloaded from the net over the shared wireless in the park.
1) City as canvas. Some of the first talk of digital paper got me thinking about it. I figured everything would be covered in DP when it became cheap.. sidewalks, streets, buildings, clothes, etc.. Even better, these surfaces would be wired up to the net.. finally making use of the supposed 1k IP addresses/square foot that IPv6 is supposed to give us. For what use? P2P Advertising, of course. Use your video-cell phone, visit the GPS-located webpage for the wall you're standing next to, micro-pay for 5 minutes of time an hour for now, record your marriage proposal over your phone, play it back on the wall for QA, and then show up later with your soon to be wife.
2) Star-booths. I live near a park. It's really a lovely place.. largely maintained by the neighbors, not city-hall. I'd like to give something to it. Well, I've been toying with the idea of making a "star booth". Take celestia (shatters.net/celestia), a laptop computer, microphone, some as-yet-non-existent voice-recognition program, a digital projector, and some cleverly shaped/coated hard plastic. Erect a stand with the computer closed, but running celestia. Video out to the projector, which projects up at a bubble of half-shpere plastic. The plastic serves as umbrella and screen. Voice commands a floating cursor. "Left, Right" or "30 degrees declination,
3) Massively parallel computing -- hardback edition. At CMU, freshmen CS students have a course where you design a CPU on paper out of NAND gates. You build up complex circuits a unit at a time. The professor starts you off with something like a multiplexer, and you get to do the rest.. up to about 4, single byte-wide instructions. Neat course. Anyways.. you're looking at the circuits, thinking how f'ing beautiful it all is, how simple. Then you find out about digital paper. Aha! Why not just print a circuit that really works? You could almost start doing gates as letters in a font. Just type the damn thing in. I have a fontographer friend, and my goal was to blow his mind by showing him a real A-Z font-set that was designed in such a way as to actually compute the words you typed in it, e.g. "AND" would have leads on the left side of the A, and a single output on the right side of the D, and it would literally compute the AND function when electrified. NAND, MUX, etc. etc. And then just use a page-layout program to make a kind of word painting/circuit. Stacks of pages, joined by the spine/bus, all working in parallel. The real trick would then be...
4) Computing as art. Take this a step further by designing a font set/phraseology/circuit that allowed you to write poetry that actually computes something associated with the meaning of the poem. Take this a step further and render something in digital paper, framed as a classical painting. Basically, I thought you'd have a museum installation where you'd have a pedastal with a book on it. The book would be most finely wrought, goldleaf, gorgeous colorings, leather-bound. And plugged into the wall (store the power 'lectrics in the spine). Behind the book on the wall, a large canvas, gorgeously framed. But no painting. The book has a fine, lacely thread leading to the canvas.
The museum visit
What are you doing dave? I'm not a cake, Dave, you shouldn't serve me up at the party. Daaaavey, daaaaaaaaaaaavey, da a a a a aaaaav eeeeeyyy. daaaaaaa.....
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Interesting timing, as King Arthur, a new boardgame using conductive ink just premiered at the big Essen game fest in Germany. This should count as a useful application.
Maybe one day this could be used to make digital graf all over the place. Imagine your tag glowing and changing colors to the beat of the surrounding cityscape.
Ok so who wants to go start designing this????
Try finding a lawyer who actually understands what he reads and your problem will go away. Thanks for the troll.
I see some interesting potential for this, perhaps this technology would come in handy with bills and checks?
I think the uses for this stops when you're thinking of building anything large out of it, simply because of the clumsiness of paper (and the obviously incineration ;) )
Stops? But think of how easily Mr. Bond can dispose of his top secret weapons control circuits in the case of a security breach!
Seriously, though... the espianage implications (both corporate and governmental) are staggering. What about secure encrypted data storage? Keep sensitive data in a medium that can be destroyed beyond any conceivable means of repair by ripping into quarters and burning in less than a minute! Granted, it's not going to be a lot of data any time soon, but...
A few mm drift is enough to make it useless. A oldfashion DIL IC has a spacing of 2.54mm. More modern packages have spacings of 1mm and less.
This would work for axial components like resistors, capacitors and diodes, leds and Transistors should work as well.
IIRC, "Fahrenheit 451" refers to the flash point of paper required for proper book burning. That would be Fahrenheit, not (whap!clue) Celcius.
But if you were to implement an IBM 360 processor on paper then you could implement the Halt and Catch Fire instruction from the over-extended instruction set.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Yeah, but the packages aren't the size of a whole page. There is hardly any drift on small scales so any one component would match up fine. If you had a single component that was 10 inches long that needed to connect to a paper circuit with smaller than 1mm pads, then the pads might not match up. But who wants that? Maybe if you wanted to make a robotic assembly line that always put components in the same place down to the millimeter across the whole page, you would have problems. But if you're making an assembly line you're going to be using a higher quality printer than your "we're giving them away to sell cartriges" type printer. Accuracy shouldn't be a problem on those.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
There's the poster radio with real working controls just printed on the poster. It's over an inch thick though, not a real poster. Oh, and there's a poster phone as well.
Here's an inflatable radio. How is it different from other inflatable radios? Mainly that the controls are printed right on the inflatable surface.
And here's some more boring toys which use the T-Ink technology.
Actually, I'm sort of surprised ThinkGeek hasn't picked up on some of those items...
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
In the spirit of the season, this'll really help when I forget to take the wrapper off my candy and gum!