Draw and fold working circuitry with the silver-ink pen Top boffins in Illinois have invented a truly joyous piece of kit: a pen full of silver ink which can be used to draw functioning electronic circuitry on paper, wood (including – of course – breadboards) and other suitable surfaces. "Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices 'on-the-fly'," says Jennifer …
When I can stamp a microprocessor at appropriate parts of the paper too I'll be even happier.
This is the second step towards buying a touch sensitive sheet of e-ink paper and making it into a paper thin computer!
Step one was those printable batteries http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/08/paintable_batteries/
Or of course it can be used for impromptu summoning of demons, portals to another universe, or just a *really* good lock on a hotel door.
(Hmm, does the Laundry fall under "divine being", "spawn of satan", "nuclear fireball", "troll", "black helicopter", "boffin", "alien" or "big brother"?)
Fibre tip silver loaded pens available for years.
Main use is repair of tracks.
Issues with use:
* Pen dries out.
* Silver is very expensive
* current is very limited
* Adding the actual resistors, capacitors, ICs. etc., Gluing them on sort of works, but any flex at all the connect between track and pin cracks.
* need to solder copper wires or printed copper track for power supply pins, connectors, LED or speaker drive etc...
* Wood, paper, cotton etc are useless. They become too conductive if there is any moisture about.
* I first tried this in late 1970s
* Still successfully repairing damaged tracks on real PCBs.
So this sounds more like a pair of Art students rather than real Boffins or Engineers.
Yes, this would be great. Especially if the printer cartridge could be filled with silver ink (there ARE inkjets that can do this) and a suitable substrate to print on,
Somewhere I've got a book from the 1920s on 'wireless' (the big wooden box sort) with do-it-yourself instructions. -Make a resistor by drawing a line with a graphite pencil on a piece of dry smooth oak. - Soft pencil ;6B for low resistance, hard pencil 6H for high resistance. Make a microphone by stretching a paper diaphragm over the top of an empty cocoa tin and draw a line across it with a pencil. 'condensers' were made from layers of foil from chocolate bar wrapping separated by layers of waxed paper.
As in this stuff: http://www.maplin.co.uk/conductive-pen-33837
I've been using similar things to that to fix (and prototype) PCBs with conductive silver inks/paints for a good few years, and conductive ink's also been useful for model making (why weaken thin plastic parts with grooves for wires when you can run a conductive path under the paint? :D). Even the multilayer thing doesn't seem new- a quick application of non-conductive paint or lacquer meant you could draw over the top of existing traces.
Or maybe it's just news because it's flexible? I've never tried to flex parts with conductive ink on.
...but it seems a lot of other people have had the same idea. Instead I'll just say:
Ooh, I see this paywall doesn't send the whole article and depend on the browser behaving properly to stop you seeing it. Fancy that! Murdoch, take note please.
contrary to popular belief, merkia isn't always up to speed with technology. They may have invented autoflushing toilets, but didn't get teletext till the 1990s.
So I could easily believe they are unaware of the pens we've had for years to repair ciruit boards.
Their triumph is in selling it to the world as a US invention.
We've had conductive ink pens in the US for decades, too; the supposedly big deal here is that this one is flexible.
And who'd want teletext? Teletext is crap, barely even suitable for flushing down those automatic toilets y'all had to learn from us how to make. We got the *Web* in the 1990s.
Since the article doesn't make any mention of the existing pens/inks, it's incorrect to assume that any reference to the useful characteristics of this new pen/ink must therefore be an improvement over the existing ones - the way that paragraph was worded only suggested to me that having flexible ink is a nice to have feature for conductive ink above and beyond it merely being conductive, rather than a characteristic exclusive to this particular version of conductive ink.
And after one very quick Google reveals there are at least two European manufacturers of silver conductive ink pens useable on flexible substrates, it suggests these Merkin "boffins" really have done nothing more than reinvent a round load bearing device of use in the transportation industry...
The conduction path is only *part* of the problem.
Note that in *theory* the inks (or rather a basis for development) exist in the thick film hybrid industry. Both resistive and insulating ones exist so screen printed resistors (and to a lesser extent) capacitors have been available for decades.
*But* the substrates have usually been rigid ceramic and the firing temperatures have been in the 700-800c range (not really home oven use. Not even SMT hot level).
No one ever seems to have *quite* got round to making a semiconductor ink, which would be the *key* bit to making active devices like transistors.
Zinc Oxide? Titanium Oxide? (fairly cheap and classed as non toxic but I'm sure it is a semi-conductor) Cadmium Sulfide or Selenide? The last too are pretty toxic but definitely are.
Mine would be the one with a rather elderly back copy of Practical Electronics in the pocket.
Rollerball. Oops.
Any pen with a ball nib (Bic biros upwards) requires significant friction on the writing surface to roll the ball. Smooth surface - no writing. Not very clever.
Oh, and GCM Roberts: whatever conductive stuff you're using needs to stay conductive while it's in the pen. The problem with copper is that it's highly reactive and forms a surface layer of (insulating) oxide within minutes. So your bits of copper are not going to be talking to each other. Silver is very unreactive (it takes months to get a decent layer of oxide), which gives you a reasonable shelf life for the stuff. Gold or platinum would be even better, of course, but that would be a bit more expensive.
Load the ink into a tattoo artist's needle and perhaps you can create conductive designs on skin too.
This might be one way to solve the iPhone "grip of death" issue. Strapline borrowed from the Xbox Kinect: "You Are The Antenna"...
Possible drawbacks include increased risk of lightning strikes, and allergic reactions for werewolves.
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