Slashdot Mirror
Silver Pen Allows For Hand-Written Circuits
Zothecula writes "People have been using pens to jot down their thoughts for thousands of years but now engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that allows users to jot down electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces. Looking just like a regular ballpoint pen, the pen's ink consists of a solution of real silver that dries to leave electrically conductive silver pathways. These pathways maintain their conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling users to personally fabricate low-cost, flexible and disposable electronic devices."
These things have been around for decades, fuck knows why this is suddenly news.
It comes in handy when your man-animal may be spying to steal your teleportation secrets...
This is not really new stuff... Silver pens for "circuit repair" have been available for ages... They made a ballpoint version.
They invented a product that has been available for over 20 years....
http://www.mgchemicals.com/products/pens.html
What's next from these ingenious companies?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Doesn't graphite do the same thing, more or less?
This seems neat for rapid prototyping and the hobbyist, but I wonder about 2 things. What is the cost since silver isn't exactly inexpensive? Also since I am not an electronics person how does one make connections to it since I would think that solder would burn paper?
Time to offend someone
Too bad the ol' Ag has gotten really expensive recently, "despite" the recession and all the all the stimulus.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
What's next from these ingenious companies?
A patent of course.
You could have used a mechanical pencil for that. That is what I did.
They didn't claim to invent the fucking paper too
as others have pointed out this has been around for decades, and you can make your own ghetto version using copper radiator repair solution
So they spend time making something that already exists. Go to any art store and you'll be able to buy silver ink pens. And the roller variants don't work well on PCBs actually. So you're better of with other versions. I don't get how this sort of things even make it onto news sites. This has about the same quality level as the "force field" thing some computer science students came up with last month.
It might also be useful for repairing electrical connections for circuit traces especially on boards that flex. I would love something like this since I could fix the window control on my car since the drivers door window controls no longer control the rear passenger side window and I don't want to spend the money for a new switch unit, if I can even find one.
Time to offend someone
http://www.radioshack.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=pen%20conductive%20ink&origkw=pen+conductive+ink&sr=1
I'd like to see how they gonna secure SMDs and BGAs to silver circuits scribbled on a bar napkin. Steve Wozniak no doubt would've loved if he coulda done that.
That's what I would like to see, let's have someone put that metal jewelry and ink to use, attach a battery to your nose ring, embed an LED in your face, other cool stuff.
In defense, this might be the first time a ball point pen has been used with conductive ink. While I've used conductive ink on boards before, they have all been felt tip pens. What benefit does a ball point have over felt tip? I have no idea.
Prototyping wouldn't normally be done using using conductive pens. The hand drawn stuff was usually a resist pen on the actual copper-clad board, then etched.
wake me up when i can finally buy a cheap printer that creates circuit boards.
They're also hugely popular for Intel LGA775 processors.
The pen's ok, and reasonably priced, but they get you on the toner cartridges...
Maybe Zuckerberg can get a patent for "System and Method for Using a a Silver-inked Rollerball Pen in a Social Network".
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
The Gizmodo article linked in the summary is a blurb based on some research done at the University of Illinois, and, according to that blurb, published in the journal Advanced Materials ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1521-4095 ). Looking at the current issue of Advanced Materials, the work doesn't show up, but there are a slew of other articles that the Slashdot crowd might find very interesting.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Who's moderating these things? :)
There's this new game console coming out, but it's from a little-known company that used to make playing cards. I wish them luck but I really don't think they'll be able to beat Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision.
DIY electronic toilet paper, here we come!
Okay, just joking. But IIRC the fellow who designed the 6502 that started the PERSONAL microcomputer revolution big-time, AKA Apple, Commodore, etc. drew the masks by hand and to most people's astonishment got it right on the first interconnect cut. Hand him the pen and let him loose!
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This has been done for decades.
Why don't you check some old 1960's Popular Mechanics on Google before embarrassing yourselves?
Being able to make the leads with a pen is all very nice, but what about actual components? Call me when you can draw a functioning capacitor, transistor, etc. Until then, I don't really know what you'd do with this.
Perhaps I've read too much Charlie Stross, but this story immediately think that users should be careful what they draw with this pen...
There must be some clever way to make a cool card or board game using this, but I can't think of it yet. :)
This pen is laying down particles of silver in a binder. Sadly, the article says nothing about resistance, but it's got to be much higher than what you'd get with a pure silver trace, no?