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NiTROACTiVE

Circuit Scribe Allows You To Draw Working Circuits With A Pen

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Have you ever thought up of the fantasy of drawing real circuits with a pen rather than using wires? Well that fantasy has come true with Circuit Scribe! When I first saw this, I was shocked and amazed at the same time. They also have a Kickstater where you can donate to have them develop other projects that could also be mind blowing as this.

Here's a video they made demonstrating the new invention:



Go here for their Kickstater:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/electroninks/circuit-scribe-draw-circuits-instantly

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That does look pretty awesome, I can already imagine all kinds of things I could do with that. Fortunately, it looks like they've got more pledged than their goal, that's great.

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Pretty clever. I'd have loved one of those in grades 8 and 9 when I was building ridiculously unreliable science projects that tended to use aluminum foil to lay out circuits when wires weren't appropriate.

A useful companion product would be a printer or a conversion for some existing printer(s). Cheap DIY PCBs!

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Maes said:

Well, in classic manual PCB design you quite literally draw circuits with a marker on a copper board.


I used that same technique when I was in school, many years ago.

I have a question. Is this suitable for use in "normal" paper? I mean, an electronic circuit generates heat, which in turn could burn paper. Am I saying something stupid here/missing the point?

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Zed said:

I have a question. Is this suitable for use in "normal" paper? I mean, an electronic circuit generates heat, which in turn could burn paper. Am I saying something stupid here/missing the point?


That is a good point, but I think maybe they have engineered the ink in a way to keep the paper safe, but I don't know, could be stupid of me as well. Whatever they have, it should be very safe.

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I think you'd need a lot of juice to burn paper. This stuff looks cool but I think I'll stick to copper boards.

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Krispy said:

I think you'd need a lot of juice to burn paper.


Probably true, but this still makes me wonder how safe it is. They might just say not to draw self portraits and run electricity through them.

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HK!D said:

Probably true, but this still makes me wonder how safe it is. They might just say not to draw self portraits and run electricity through them.


It's certainly possible to put a load on the circuits that would ignite the paper, even with a tiny battery (eg. high-resistance filaments like in light bulbs). The real question is going to be how easy it is to get the ink hot.

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Aliotroph? said:

The real question is going to be how easy it is to get the ink hot.


Probably easier than a pure copper trace -I can't imagine this "ink" being a better conductor than solid copper wires, even if silver-based, so for one it will heat up easier in case of a short.

On the bright side, any extra heat generated due to higher losses will tend to dissipate throughout all of the circuit made from this "ink", so it will -probably- not generate hot spots...then again, you never know how the material will behave when the heat is turned on, as it might contain solvents, additives etc. which may bubble or go tp in smoke before the silver does, even when the ink is supposedly dry.

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I remember that my father had this thing when he was a kid where you would fill in specific parts of some copper circuit boards with a marker, and then you would dip it in this acid that ate the exposed copper. The kit he had would let you build a voltmeter with it.

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Aliotroph? said:

The real question is going to be how easy it is to get the ink hot.

Traces drawn by conventional silver polymer pens have a typical resistance of 0.2 ohm per centimetre, which is about 100 times the resistance of 1 amp hookup wire. The Circuit Scribe traces appear to be even higher -

"The written lines achieve a conductivity of 50-100 milliohms per square per mil."

My 16 amp bench power supply should be more than adequate to fry that stuff, the question being whether I can start a fire before the trace melts.

Silver polymer pens have been around since at least the mid 90s and I've occasionally considered using them for circuit board repair but never liked the price tag, a short length of copper wire and a steady hand with the soldering iron usually did the job. To me, Circuit Scribe looks to be more of an evolutionary development than something new and radical, the main drawback for a dedicated hobbyist/experimenter is likely to be the limited range of components supplied with the pens.

I might yet back this project, if only out of curiosity.

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