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...
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?
For geeks with AMD CPUs and old ATI graphics cards, a sharp pencil was almost mandatory.
Silver pens were permanent. If you fried your chip with the "pencil lead" mod, all you needed to do was grab your eraser and RMA!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
What's next from these ingenious companies?
A patent of course.
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
With a tendency toward "less". Graphite is pretty conductive, fairly cheap, and has some useful mechanical properties(albeit often when mixed with other materials); but is a bit more resistive than most metals. Silver, by contrast, while more expensive, is among the most conductive materials commonly available(discounting oddities that are superconductive at atypical temperatures, or materials that have unusual properties in films a few atoms thick, and so on).
If you don't need a particularly conductive trace, a pencil will work just fine. You can even add impromptu carbon-film resistors, if you don't need high thermal dissipation or terribly precise tolerances; but if you want something as close to indistinguishable from the trace that is supposed to be there, silver is a better bet.
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.
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.
Yea, but do you know how well a ball point pen works on PCB? Pretty poorly, which is why we use felt.
I'd bet a good chunk of money this isn't even the first 'ball point pen with conductive ink', its more likely that intelligent people realized a long time ago that ball point pens work really poorly on surfaces with no texture to cause them to roll ... like say a perfectly smooth fibreglass PCB backing that you'd want to draw conductive lines on.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Which is probably why the article doesn't mention PCBs - it mentions paper, wood etc. The current felt pens work poorly on those surfaces, particularly if you flex them.
wake me up when i can finally buy a cheap printer that creates circuit boards.
Nap time over! I've been doing it for nearly a decade with an old LaserJet 4. Can't get much cheaper than that.
1. Make circuit
2. Print out on thermal resist paper on LaserJet
3. Use modified laminator to bond resist to copper
4. Etch
5. Not Profit (screwed up circuit, again....)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Perhaps I've read too much Charlie Stross, but this story immediately think that users should be careful what they draw with this pen...