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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!
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'.
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!
Remind me not to overclock my paper on analytic processing... especially not if it's funded by AMD!
#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.
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!"
Of course, most uses of this technology wouldn't use regular printer paper. I'm sure it prints on sheets of plastic or cloth as well.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.