Soft Inkjet Circuits

Project Details
Project Name :

Soft Inkjet Circuits

Project Category :

01Digital Fabrication Technologies, Arshad, Featured Project, Steimle

Skill :

Best Paper Award

Client Review :

(UIST 2019)

Description :

Soft Inkjet Circuits

Rapid Multi-Material Fabrication of Soft Circuits Using a Commodity Inkjet Printer


Despite the increasing popularity of soft interactive devices, their fabrication remains complex and time consuming. We contribute a process for rapid do-it-yourself fabrication of soft circuits using a conventional desktop inkjet printer. It supports inkjet printing of circuits that are stretchable,ultra-thin,high resolution, and integrated with a wide variety of materials used for prototyping.We introduce multi-ink functional printing on a desktop printer for realizing multi-material devices, including conductive and isolating inks. We further present DIY techniques to enhance compatibility be-tween inks and substrates and the circuits’ elasticity. This enables circuits on a wide set of materials including temporary tattoo paper, textiles, and thermoplastic. Four application cases demonstrate versatile uses for realizing stretchable devices, e-textiles, body-based and re-shapeable interfaces.

The publication received a Best Paper Award at ACM UIST’19.

Publication

Arshad Khan, Joan Sol Roo, Tobias Kraus, Jürgen Steimle
In Proceedings of the annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST) 2019.


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