Silver Pen Allows For Hand-Written Circuits 161
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."
Not slashdot too! (Score:5, Insightful)
These things have been around for decades, fuck knows why this is suddenly news.
Re:Not slashdot too! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Isn't that what people used to unlock restricted multipliers on microprocessors? Or did those pens us a different conductive metal?
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That you?
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Indeed, if you look at many old (1980) PCBs you can see how they were designed by hand. They would prototype with a pen and then use that as a template to make masks for etching. There is something quite beautiful about those hand drawn layouts, devoid of straight lines and equal spacing everywhere.
Prototyping with a resist pen (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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0.3oz is $22
And still cheaper than an inkjet.
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A bottle of the most expensive wine you can find at your local wine shop is cheaper than inkjet ink. Why anyone still buys those things, I have no idea.
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We used black masking tape of various widths on a clear mylar sheet, typically at 2:1.
The advantage of hand layout is you can create virtually any shape you need. This is important for power electronics where wide traces are needed to carry large currents or to conduct heat away from components.
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It's not news but, in slashdot, it's entertainment.
Observe how this obvious old news generate a greater response than today's average.
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I've been using them for almost my entire EE career. I have a small can of conductive paint as well. You can buy conductive fabric and thread too.
But it's a Ball Point (Score:1)
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What benefit does a ball point have over felt tip? I have no idea.
Doesn't dry out as quick when the cap is off. You get to use it for more than 15 minutes.
The more important reason is probably to avoid patents.
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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.
Re:But it's a Ball Point (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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*golf clap*
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I think the point is that these have a ball at the end, so you can make very fine circuit diagrams. Those other circuit diagram pens are more like a ink-style pen, where if you press too hard it all comes out. Plus it's hard to draw fine lines with current pens.
It's similar to the difference between a old style ink pen and a ball-point pen -- they both serve the same purpose, but the ball-point pen is much easier to use with less mess.
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I too would like to know what the major innovation is? Is it just a bunch of freshman who didn't know about this before and didn't bother doing a Google search?
Re:Not slashdot too! (Score:5, Informative)
The article fails to explain what's new here, a major failing since most every slashdotter will have heard of circuit repair pens. These guys apparently used silver nano-particles and hydroxyethyl cellulose [physorg.com] to create a flexible conductor, presumably much more so than the circuit repair pens that have been around forever. I must admit I've never tried using a repair pen on something flexible, but I'm guessing it dries pretty rigid.
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Nope, as I pointed out on El Reg - pretty flexible:
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/mobiuscircuit [evilmadscientist.com]
From 2009
Re:Not slashdot too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Original article here [wiley.com] (sorry, no free version available). I find ridiculous that they provide (mostly self) references to existing art, but they fail to mention commercial felt-tip silver pens.
By a quick look at the paper, their ink has a resistivity of 2*10^(-4) Ohm*cm (25 C print temperature) which is not so lower than the 5*10^(-4) Ohm*cm commercially available ink [mgchemicals.com]. They do reach lower resistivity, but with high temperature annealing, so it cannot be compared directly (and they fail to).
Maybe their ink is more flexible, but again they fail to provide comparison with existing ink.
Their ink has probably lower viscosity due to the use of nanoparticles (they are working between 1 and 10 Pa*s) and this probably allows for the use of rollerball pens, but if felt-tip pens are working fine with a most likely cheaper ink, why should I care?
However they do manage to master the acronyms creation art, providing the catchy PoP shorthening for their groundbreaking pen-on-paper circuit drawing approach...
My question (Score:2)
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I suspect if you drew the symbol for a non-polar capacitor on regular paper, that you would actually make one. They might even be useful in high-frequency applications!
Ditto for a resistor, although you might need a lot of squiggles for it to resist much.
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These things have been around for decades, fuck knows why this is suddenly news.
Probably because the original came out before many /.rs were born and somebody just re-discovered it. Next week, there will probably be a post about this crazy idea on how to etch our own circuit boards.
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Maybe they need to post stories like this just to give all us old /.ers a chance to come on and say that we've been using these things since before yer momma was born, and such.
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...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Of course the same youngins who think the silver pen is a new invention probably won't understand the Kool-Aid reference.
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Goodbye, Slashdot.
How much are you auctioning off that 6 digit ID for? =)
-AI
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In Soviet Russia, Slashdot says Goodbye dzlban303!
Life immiates art once again. (Score:5, Informative)
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I see what you did there.
Not really new... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is not really new stuff... Silver pens for "circuit repair" have been available for ages... They made a ballpoint version.
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indeed. the previous versions have all been markers afaik. I wonder how well such a thin line from a ballpoint pen works? They probably had to up the conductivity a lot since when you're drawing a 1/8" line with a marker you don't need super high grade conductivity.
But then again the ballpoint pen probably won't work on nearly as many surfaces as the old markers do.
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I have one with a tip that's not much thicker than a standard ball point pen line. Thus far it's never given me a flaky connection but it's not like I'm running 50w through it or drawing traces longer than a few centimeters. I guess this is for people who like to free-hand multi-layered A4 sized PCBs...
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This is not really new stuff... Silver pens for "circuit repair" have been available for ages... They made a ballpoint version.
This is not really new stuff... Silver pens for "circuit repair" have been available for ages... They copied a ballpoint version.
FTFY.
-AI
Amazing!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
They invented a product that has been available for over 20 years....
http://www.mgchemicals.com/products/pens.html [mgchemicals.com]
What's next from these ingenious companies?
Re:Amazing!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Amazing!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
And it gets better - graphite is an electrical conductor! Now we've gone full circle.
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Next week, graphite in a wooden cylinder that can make marks on pressed and dried wood pulp.
The Russians already invented those so that they could have a writing instrument that would work in weightless environments.
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Alas, too bad that story is false [snopes.com]. Both space agencies initially used pencils.
Anyhow, one of the reasons for switching is the graphite dust that pencils emit - it could be troublesome since it hangs in the air - either fouling filters or could potentially short-circuit some of the electricals. And also the broken tips that happen annoyingly often - break the tip and it could send that
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It's not only in orbit that pencils cannot be used. Clean rooms do not allow pencils either. Graphite is dirty and messy.
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Next week, graphite in a wooden cylinder that can make marks on pressed and dried wood pulp.
Dear sir,
Am intrigued by graphite in wooden cylinder. Please send more information and purchasing requirements.
-AI
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Yes. Are you looking to collect royalties or something?
What's next? I'll tell you what's next... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's next from these ingenious companies?
A patent of course.
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Mod parent up.
A conductive ink pen and a trace-cutter used to be standard equipment when debugging new PC boards. Today, you usually get it right the first time using CAD tools. Today's pin spacing is too close for hand drawing.
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They invented a product that has been available for over 20 years....
http://www.mgchemicals.com/products/pens.html [mgchemicals.com]
What's next from these ingenious companies?
That product in general has been around something in excess of 40 years. Mostly used to repair scratched car rear-view mirrors.
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PCB's? as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl [wikipedia.org]
I dont think you can draw on those...
Now if you are talking BLANK phenolic boards with holes in them? Those are not "Printed Circuit Boards" therefore you can never buy a PCB without the P.
you are looking for this stuff....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfboard [wikipedia.org]
although that's for old skool stuff. I prefer sheets of thin fiberglass board to do surface mount on...
http://www.mcmaster.com/#plastics/=cyzx5h [mcmaster.com] is what I keep on hand....
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If there's no 'P', then there's no 'C' either. You just want the 'B'. You could use copper-clad laminate without the copper cladding. That'd be a sheet of FR-4, or polyester, or polyimide, etc.
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It's "gasp" flexible and "gasp" writes on paper all the stuff from 20-40 years ago is the same thing. I turned in an EE project completely on paper in the 80's by using those pens. in fact mine was two sided.
You did not read anything about what was being talked about did you?
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The pen is not flexible.
the ink has always been flexible and has always worked on paper.
So they invented an old product why? oh to use a inferior ink delivery method.... the roller ball.
This is not new (Score:1)
Conductive ink pens have existed for years. I remember the time where overclocking certain AMD CPU's required one to bridge two points on the back of the chip.
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You could have used a mechanical pencil for that. That is what I did.
The Russians use a pencil (Score:2)
Doesn't graphite do the same thing, more or less?
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Pencil... Yes, that's how you scribble a resistor... Real lead pencils work even better.
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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!
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If you don't need a particularly conductive
neat for rapid development (Score:2)
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Scotch tape?
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how does one make connections to it since I would think that solder would burn paper?
Just tape the components to the paper ;)
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you can get conductive glue as well, but if your buying that you dont really need a pen as it comes with a brush applicator
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It's amazing how little silver it takes to actually be conductive. Just like Goldschlager [wikipedia.org] can have flakes of real gold in it and not really be expensive, so can these pens.
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Also since I am not an electronics person how does one make connections to it since I would think that solder would burn paper?
I am an "electronics person" and have accidentally managed to rest my soldering iron against a piece of paper every now and then.
Surprisingly it takes quite a lot of heat to make paper burn when you don't have an open flame to begin with.
It takes right around 451 deg Fahrenheit, sustained.
-AI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 [wikipedia.org]
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/LewisChung.shtml [hypertextbook.com]
Expensive metal is expensive (Score:2)
Too bad the ol' Ag has gotten really expensive [yahoo.com] recently, "despite" the recession and all the all the stimulus.
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They are expensive because of the recession. It is common for people to move their money into "safer" investments like silver and gold during a recession. That leads to a precious metals bubble making these investments highly dangerous, which of course, attracts even more money.
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Don't ignore the effect of printing staggering quantities of money... The "value" of an ounce of gold has always been about the cost of a man's suit or a really decent new handgun, and the "value" of an ounce of silver has always been about one unskilled laborers days pay or about a weeks groceries or about one box of ammo.
Due to inflation, both long term and recently, both have skyrocketed numerically, but the value hasn't changed much.
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The value of anything is purely subjective. Value is only defined in terms of social phenomena. There is no such thing as a 'bubble'. Bubbles are an attempt to rationalize events by fitting a narrative to them (see also all sports commentary [xkcd.com]).
Value is random and turbulent, as are all markets. Markets are fundamentally unpredictable in the same sense that the weather is. There are no 'safe' investments, at any time. There are no oracles, there is no God, there is no solution to the halting problem. We are al
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A bubble describes the social phenomena of the price of something rising because people believing it will continue to rise based on recent experience.
"Markets are fundamentally unpredictable in the same sense that the weather is."
Just like the weather you can predict where markets will probably be a few days from now, but there is no way to predict exactly where it will be five years from now.
Just like the weather, general trends can be predicted far in advance, like winter will be cold and summer will be h
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A bubble describes the social phenomena of the price of something rising because people believing it will continue to rise based on recent experience.
A meaningless definition. Bubbles are defined in retrospect, i.e. the stock takes a nose dive, at which point you will construct a narrative that says it was supposed to happen.
Just like the weather you can predict where markets will probably be a few days from now, but there is no way to predict exactly where it will be five years from now.
I'm glad you understood the analogy. You don't seem to consider the conclusions though. Markets are less predictable than the weather; with weather systems all the inputs are known. Global Warming is an unpredictable emergent effect of random behavior. The analogous events in financial markets would be any market crash, and these uns
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Many people recognized the US housing and .com bubbles before they burst. When the gold price crashes, you can dig up this comment and apologies.
"Global Warming is an unpredictable emergent effect of random behavior."
Scientists first predicted global warming many decades ago. If we had understood how the atmosphere work earlier we would have been predicted it even sooner.
While I don't deny unpredictable things happen that can cause rapid rise in prices, a bubble is where there is a rise in price no reason r
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Many people recognized the US housing and .com bubbles before they burst. When the gold price crashes, you can dig up this comment and apologies.
You're placing way too much faith in humanity's predictive power. We consistently overestimate it. Saying gold will crash is no more predictive, in fact, than saying it will snow in Phoenix. The when and the why are chaotic, and in the case of financial markets and other systems more complicated than snowflakes, fundamentally unknowable.
I have no idea other than naive delusion what would make you think that the actions of any individual human are predictable, let alone the collective actions of the species.
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If markets are truly they should be shut down because they are failing to serve their purpose in our economic system (not that they aren't doing a really crappy job anyway)
There is chaos and unpredictability in the markets, but they are still bound by the realities of supply and demand. Unexpected things can happen to supply and demand that can cause unexpected things to happen to the market, but if that isn't happening, then an unjustified price increase is probably a bubble.
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They are expensive because of the recession. It is common for people to move their money into "safer" investments like silver and gold during a recession. That leads to a precious metals bubble making these investments highly dangerous, which of course, attracts even more money.
True 'precious metals' or ones used by governments
and countries as an exchange medium for debt and
a hedge against inflation, cannot truly bubble. That
is why we use them.
An economic bubble (sometimes referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, a price bubble, a financial bubble, a speculative mania or a balloon) is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”.[1][2] It could also be described as a trade in products or assets with inflated val
I am surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
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
New? (Score:1)
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And the roller variants don't work well on PCBs actually.
I think that's why everything in the article was pointing
in every direction EXCEPT rigid PCBs., ie, paper.
You are correct about everything else tho.
-AI
Another use (Score:2)
Radio shack even has it. (Score:2)
http://www.radioshack.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=pen%20conductive%20ink&origkw=pen+conductive+ink&sr=1
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That's where I got the one I used to enable reflash on my Xbox...
Devices more than just a circuit 'board' (Score:2)
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.
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The EXACT same way you do it when your baking it onto the board? You glue it on. Of course on a normal PCB when its then baked to melt the solder, it gets a much stronger bond from the solder ... but glue is what holds the SMDs and such on until they get baked.
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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.
All you need to do is look at the linked article to see that they have done exactly this for paper circuits.
Conductive ink / glue (silver dust in an adhesive vehicle) is pretty standard stuff. I use it all the time in my lab to make connections that are simultaneously mechanically secure and electrically conductive.
Conductive tattoo ink (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
Then there's the pr0n-industrial complex applications, that industry is always a leader in technology, at least behind the scenes. One person wears the battery, the other wears the cellphone motor, etc.
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Zuckerberg (Score:2)
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Nah someone will forge a document and then try to sue him for copying their idea.
-AI
Advanced Materials (Score:2)
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 [wiley.com] ). 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.
Time to draw me out a 6503! (Score:2)
Not fucking news! (Score:2)
This has been done for decades.
Why don't you check some old 1960's Popular Mechanics on Google before embarrassing yourselves?
Watch out! (Score:3)
Perhaps I've read too much Charlie Stross [wikipedia.org], but this story immediately think that users should be careful what they draw with this pen...
High electrical resistance? (Score:2)
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?
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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....)
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The resist paper is a special paper that bonds the printed tracks to the board. I'd give you the name, but I'm traveling and don't remember the company that p
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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.