Video Another 'Draw Your Own Circuits' System at SXSW (Video) 27
This kind of product seems to be attractive to the kind of people who fund Kickstarter projects, and this bunch seems to have good resumes and some interesting, well thought-out products. There is apparently room in the 'draw circuits and learn electrical basics' market for both AgIC and Electroninks -- and probably for another dozen competitors, too.
Timothy Lord for Slashdot: Analisa, Circuit Scribe is offering a draw your own circuit system. Can you talk about it?
Analisa: Sure. Our company is called Electroninks Writables, and we make the Circuit Scribe conductive ink pen. And it is basically a rollerball applicator that has a non-toxic water and silver based ink in it. And you use it for drawing your own circuits on paper.
Slashdot: What sort of surfaces can it draw on?
Analisa: So you can basically do anything that we have over here. The way that our components work is that they have magnets at the bottom of them, and so if you are working on top of a steel top table like we have here, or like a touch board or a white board, the magnets themselves make a physical contact and electrical contact to the circuit. So right here we have a battery that is hooked up to an LED through a conductive ink. And then another example would be something like a motor module.
Slashdot: And all these modules are all being powered on the circuit by the attached 9 volt.
Analisa: Exactly. It is a 9 volt battery.
Slashdot: I see interesting shapes and color coding here, can you talk about what those mean?
Analisa: Oh sure, so in this particular sticker right here, we can pop in different yellow components which are actually outputs, yellow means output, so with our RGB LEDs we can cycle through a blue, green, red LED. Or you could set up your circuits and mix those color types together to make purple or turquoise.
Slashdot: What do the shapes signify? Are they also, do they say anything functional about what the objects are?
Analisa: Oh sure. We try to be really consistent with the footprints of our components. So you notice that a single LED component has the same cut spacing as the RGB, and so you could easily swap in components for each other and really easily experiment with different outputs and different inputs etc.
Slashdot: What if you make a mistake and want to erase them?
Analisa: So you could cut the paper actually.
Slashdot: That’s pretty direct.
Analisa: Cut the circuit.
Slashdot: Can you talk a little bit about what the customizability of this is, is that, obviously you’ve got a little demo here which just has a couple of spots, how complex a circuit could be created.
Analisa: So that’s what you’re doing. It’s set up to two components in parallel so you can get two outputs going at the same time. You could do an LED and a motor. And we have a variety of like educational circuits on plan, so we put out both of these (shows two modules) and it sort of helps people who are new to electronics through things like what is material conductivity, what are circuits in series and circuits in parallel, all the way up to transistors.
Slashdot: If someone wants to create something that is not covered by your circuits here, with your actual components, and can you have a way to customize as well?
Analisa: Oh absolutely. We have actually created this DIY or do it yourself part. And the way that this works is that, if you have say a four pin component, you want to insert into a circuit 8-pin component, you could break off four of these feet, and figure out where to attach to your four pin set. And you can do up to a component that has eight on it. And you could customize for it. So an example of that would be like a 555 timer or microcontroller.
Slashdot: Who is your customer here? Is it individuals, it is schools?
Analisa: So our market is that, we have a couple of different markets, one is individual consumers or schools that are using this like an educational tooland Circuit Scribe commercial applications in electronic art or prototyping, and so we market this to the maker community as a whole as well.
Slashdot: How did this get from an idea to a product that you can buy actually in kits over here?
Analisa: The three cofounders of the company or four cofounders actually, are all part of the same research group at the University of Illinois and we are part of a materials research group that specialized in doing kinds of functional inks both for two dimensional printing and three dimensional printing. And so I was particularly working on silver inks, which led to Electroninks and spun out the rollerball pen applicator so it sort of makes your ink easier to apply. So three of the students then got together and we decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign based on this idea. And about a year and a half ago, we were successful in that campaign, and we found instant retail since then. Right now, our headquarters are located here in Austin, and the rest of us work out in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Slashdot: What are the biggest challenges in actually putting out something that is not going to dry out, and put it in a pen barrel, and make it dispense, what are the biggest things to overcome?
Analisa: One of the huge things we had to overcome is the fact that silver is so dense, so the ink composition itself is lot like glitter ink, like you might find in the Gelly Roll pen for example, but silver is a really dense material, so over time, it is going to settle out of the solution, so we had to do a little bit of clever material science and figure out how to keep those particles kind of homogenous throughout the lifetime of the pen.
Slashdot: Are there any new products you are working on since you have successfully Kickstarted early run, are there new things in the works?
Analisa: Sure. So we have sort of two processes of product. One is more of these, make them like circuit modules but a little bit more complex than what we already offer, so logic gates like gates, and we will soon be coming out with a kit for those. And we are also working on resistor pens. It is going to be another roller ball that has a less conductive ink so you can go and print passive components, resistors, directly in with the resistor ink.
Slashdot: I would love to see one of these in your logo turtle if you could print the circuit and have it drawn on the floor by a robot?
Analisa: That would be really neat. So we’ve actually used silver pen plotters to do that. So it is just like a desktop plotter that is smaller than an inkjet printer, and it actually can print back and forth and side to side and we printed out fairly complex circuit boards going from Eagle CAD and then importing a circuit into the plotter software and setting out a fairly complex circuit.
Slashdot: If someone wants to interact with these, can they do so with a computer as well, can they turn a circuit they’ve created on and off with a wireless control or so.
Analisa: So we don’t have any wireless components right now. But if you can figure out how to do that with an 8 pin chip you could do it, no problem. Let’s see, so there, oh yeah, we have an Arduino connection kit as well, so these are basically individual magnetic heads that have a thin wire on the other side, so we have an Arduino Raspberry Pi. Really, any hardware that has sockets in it, you could hook up your papers to that platform, and the possibilities are limitless if you are able to do that.
Draw your own Circuit (Score:2)
There's only one problem... (Score:3)
because the ink layer is so thin, these circuits have an incredible amount of resistance, even with really fat lines.
I have one of these pens and it is a fun novelty, but not useful for practical circuits. The metal content isn't high enough. It's better applied to art projects and for kids teaching where you can show them a lot of circuit concepts in a very visual manner. That's where I felt this product would excel. If you drag a lead to a lightbulb over a 10" line, depending on how thick it is the bulb will be completely out either in a few inches or with a fat line over the whole length.
A version where you squired a lot more of the material with a thickener out of a mustard type squeeze bottle would get you some more functionality. But it's fun for the kids.
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How about drawing it and THEN coating it (Score:2)
I wonder if one could draw or print a circuit, then coat it to be thicker. For example, we know if you lay a cheap circuit board with copper traces into a pan of melted solder, the solder will only stick to the copper traces, making them thicker while rolling right off the bare board. Perhaps a copper based pen/marker could be used in that way. You'd prefer something more convenient than melting enough solder to the bottom of a pan, but the general concept make work.
Along the same lines, when I was a
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It doesn't do that for me, so get Flash Player.
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First quality two-layer PCBs, gold flashed with solder mask and silk screen both sides, are available within 10-14 days for $5.00 per square inch, and for that price you get three of them.
From where? Links, please!
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Have you heard of this thing called Google, numbnuts?
It's spelled googol, if you're talking about the number, and I don't see what that has to do with providing information about companies that provide PCB fab services.
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