Printoo: Paper-Thin, Flexible Arduino-Compatible modules

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1030661323/printoo-paper-thin-flexible-arduinotm-compatible-m

by rahij • 12 years ago

82 18 12 years ago

Wow, this is awesome. This technology looks like it's poised to make it to consumer grade much faster than anyone imagined

cauterize3• 12 years ago

Very impressive. But why is the pledge goal so low?

hardwaresofton4• 12 years ago

I think they want to blow past it -- the Micro team set their pledge goal at $50k, and ended up raising something like 2 million (last I checked).

Their costs might also be particularly low, given that they are printing & laminating the circuits, and (clearly) already have the tech required to do that in place.

cauterize3• 12 years ago

That would make sense. I couldn't help but feel excited with the LEGO-like construction approach. The video made the tech feel so tangible even to a non-hardware tinkerer.

mcamara6• 12 years ago

I'm part of the team behind this project. Your guess is very much on the money on both counts - we can't deny we'd love to blow past it, and the fab process for many of the components is already set up.

One other factor is that our company, and our partners in this project, really want to get these technologies out in the open for people to use and play around with. There is a lot of innovation happening with Printed Electronics but unfortunately it has mainly been kept within R&D labs and B2B. Developing this project was an investment we were willing to make mostly internally.

Thank you so much for the enthusiasm!

userbinator• 12 years ago

This technology was unavailable to the public - until now!

FPCs have been around for many decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_electronics#History

I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't go for bare die versions of ICs like the MCU, since COF is another quite-established technology for cheap flexible electronics.

mcamara6• 12 years ago

You're very right, we should clarify. The technologies not previously available to the public refer to the printed electronics components: electrochromic displays, printed carbon-zinc batteries, LED die chips on film, printed polymer solar cells and printed light sensors.

dperfect• 12 years ago

I love the idea of FPCs, but I have a hard time understanding the practical applications.

Even the Wikipedia entry[1] seems to list examples, most of which don't entirely rely on the flexibility of the device. I can understand the need for space savings, but that seems to be achievable for most of these applications without the flexible component.

For most wearables I've seen (clothing or devices worn directly on the body), FPCs don't seem to solve anything - you still have some bulky components, and the truly flexible parts need to be handled with extra care so as not to damage connections. I mean, clothing with built-in fitness monitoring (or GPS or whatever) sounds cool, but current implementations really seem to miss the practicality ("how am I supposed to wash this again?") of truly "invisible" technology.

Can someone point me to some better practical applications?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_electronics#Applicati...

mcamara6• 12 years ago

Printed electronics companies are currently working in fields ranging from: smart credit cards (with auth codes for instance), medical patches, interactive packaging (in the Harry Pottery sense but also for sensing), interactive playing cards, children's books and board games (also Harry Pottery), smart labels for logistics purposes, stickers, control panels in automobiles and other circumstances where you may have a non-flat surface.

There's a lot of interesting work being done on the flexible board technologies themselves. AgIc and others are supplying the tools for personal fabrications of flex circuits. It's way cheaper today to prototype using inkjet printed copper on PET than normal PCBs.

Finally, there is a little distinction between traditional FPC technology, where discrete components are placed on a kapton-based film, and printed electronics technologies, the idea of producing electronics components ranging from transistors, batteries, displays, memory, antennas or sensors. Printoo uses a hybrid approach since Printed Electronics are not yet mature enough to provide the full solution.

Sorry for the lengthy reply!

wiradikusuma• 12 years ago

What can you do with it that you can't with Arduino?

mcamara6• 12 years ago

We think printed electronics allows for three key features in new products: - Freedom in design. It used to be that electronics was about designing square rigid boards to put inside square rigid boards. That doesn't have to be the case anymore. - Low-power applications. Printed components tend to be very low power (electrochromic displays) or to provide that little bit of power while still being flexible and printed (printed OPV, printed batteries); - Cost feasibility in high volume. These technologies, taking advantage of printing processes already available in the printing industry, can reach price points feasible for a lot of applications where traditional electronics are not.

Lets say you have an idea to make intelligent boarding passes for airports. With Printoo, you can make a prototype using electrochromic displays to tell you how long you have before boarding and/or how far away you are from your gate. You can have printed batteries powering the system. You can have Bluetooth for positioning and synch with the servers. It's not going to look exactly like a boarding pass, but it'll be a much closer approximation than would be possible with any other proto board and it will use technologies that would make sense for that. You would most likely be able to make and code a mock intelligent boarding pass, looking reasonably good, in under an hour.

At a second stage then you could design a custom board integrating these technologies and have concept prototype that would be much closer to a true boarding pass. We want to also help people have access to the right tools for this stage.

We thought that the current existing prototyping kits didn't offer the right form-factors to prototype product concepts for things like smart wearables and the high-volume internet of things (where intelligence is added to stickers, labels, packages, and so on).

Sorry for the long reply!

lcusack• 12 years ago

I know this is a basic question. But how exactly does Printoo work with Arduino? Do I need to buy anything from Arduino in order to use Printoo?

JL2010• 12 years ago

What they're saying is that their underlying hardware has been selected such that it can be used with the Arduino programming environment to target it as if it were a regular Arduino. So it is compatible with Arduino software and tools.

Printoo: Paper-Thin, Flexible Arduino-Compatible modules

Related Stories