University of Illinois researchers explain how they make their conductive ink on this step-by-step tutorial.

(via Boing Boing)

LED Dragon Kite by Jie Qi

Jie Qi, from MIT’s High-Low Tech group, posted a couple really nice tutorials on how to combine paper, electronics and smart materials to create beautiful objects:

LED Dragon Kite
SMA Origami Crane

Inspired by the paperduino, the cardboarduino is a physically larger version (with space for a 9V battery), designed by Allegheny College’s faculty member Matt Jadud, as way to introduce students to the fundamentals of soldering and working with physical computation.

The Cardboarduino is intended to be printed, cut out, and glued to the front and back of a piece of 5″ x 6″ piece of posterboard.

The builder pokes holes through the posterboard everywhere there is a dot on the top side of the design. It also labels the locations of all of the components, including color bands for the resistors.

Download the printable PDFs from concurrency.cc

(via guibot)

Currently the site offers three designs; a stool, a chair and a rocker.

Researchers at Stanford University seem to have done it again. This time, a paper titled “Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices,” published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a technique for using ordinary paper and coating it with a special ink, composed of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, to create a highly conductive storage device. Here’s Stanford’s press release, written by Janelle Weaver:

Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper.

Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires makes a highly conductive storage device, said Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering.

“Society really needs a low-cost, high-performance energy storage device, such as batteries and simple supercapacitors,” he said.

Like batteries, capacitors hold an electric charge, but for a shorter period of time. However, capacitors can store and discharge electricity much more rapidly than a battery.

Cui’s work is reported in the paper “Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices,” published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These nanomaterials are special,” Cui said. “They’re a one-dimensional structure with very small diameters.” The small diameter helps the nanomaterial ink stick strongly to the fibrous paper, making the battery and supercapacitor very durable. The paper supercapacitor may last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles – at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. The nanomaterials also make ideal conductors because they move electricity along much more efficiently than ordinary conductors, Cui said.

Cui had previously created nanomaterial energy storage devices using plastics. His new research shows that a paper battery is more durable because the ink adheres more strongly to paper (answering the question, “Paper or plastic?”). What’s more, you can crumple or fold the paper battery, or even soak it in acidic or basic solutions, and the performance does not degrade. “We just haven’t tested what happens when you burn it,” he said.

The flexibility of paper allows for many clever applications. “If I want to paint my wall with a conducting energy storage device,” Cui said, “I can use a brush.” In his lab, he demonstrated the battery to a visitor by connecting it to an LED (light-emitting diode), which glowed brightly.

A paper supercapacitor may be especially useful for applications like electric or hybrid cars, which depend on the quick transfer of electricity. The paper supercapacitor’s high surface-to-volume ratio gives it an advantage.

“This technology has potential to be commercialized within a short time,” said Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley. “I don’t think it will be limited to just energy storage devices,” he said. “This is potentially a very nice, low-cost, flexible electrode for any electrical device.”

Cui predicts the biggest impact may be in large-scale storage of electricity on the distribution grid. Excess electricity generated at night, for example, could be saved for peak-use periods during the day. Wind farms and solar energy systems also may require storage.

“The most important part of this paper is how a simple thing in daily life – paper – can be used as a substrate to make functional conductive electrodes by a simple process,” Yang said. “It’s nanotechnology related to daily life, essentially.”

Cui’s research team includes postdoctoral scholars Liangbing Hu and JangWook Choi, and graduate student Yuan Yang.

Sparkle Labs just announced their new business card micro kits: a paper base with embedded LEDs that light up in the dark. Check out their site for more photos and PDF instructions. We love paper circuits – please keep them coming :)

The name implies a mix of paper and concrete, hence paper-crete.

Papercrete can be mixed in many ways. Paper is principally wood cellulose, which is considered a fibrous material. Cellulose is the second most abundant material on earth after rock, and is a natural polymer – a long chain of linked sugar molecules made by the linking of smaller molecules. Different types of papercrete typically contain 50-80 percent waste paper.

Check out the living with paper website for different formulas, construction ideas and experiments.

Video of ‘Computational Sketch’, made with electronics, paper, conductive paint, magnetic paint, and magnets by Leah Buechley.

For the last couple of years a colleague of mine Ken Gregory has been researching kites as sound instruments. What he has produced is an Aeolian Kite, the kite functions similarly to an Aeolian Harp or wind harp. Rather than having stretched strings vibrated by the blowing wind to produce sound, the sound is produced by amplifying the vibrating tow line that is attached to the kite while it is in flight.

“the tow line vibrates at different frequencies induced by the various constantly changing wind intensities which can be heard as whistles or hums at very low levels. The basic idea is to experiment with acoustic and electronic amplification systems so that these sounds can be heard by the naked ear.”

Audio from the kite can be found on his site http://cheapmeat.net/soundmachineplay.html

The Articule Gallery in Montréal featured an installation by Ken entitled “wind coil sound flow”  for Elektra festival held every spring in Montréal. In this installation Ken created an analogue of his Aeolian kite and its process; images can be found on his blog http://cheapmeatdreamsandacorns.blogspot.com/.

“For his exhibition at articule, Ken Gregory will build an acoustic electro-mechanical system that poetically reproduces the processes involved in operating an Aeolian Kite Instrument in the field, a wind instrument based on an Aeolian harp. The kite’s towline is acoustically coupled to a resonator. The resonator amplifies the wind induced vibrations of the towline and resonates harmonically. A large one stringed guitar played by the wind. Receiving the audio recordings from this outdoor instrument, his electro-magnetic sculpture in the gallery not only becomes a poetic and kinetic representation of a sound speaker, but also mirrors the different components of the Aeolian Kite Instrument used to capture the wind’s voice.”

I have not seen the installation but I can imagine that it is a delight to see and hear.

One interesting project is a series of interconnected modules called “Rollz-5”, a type of drum machine which creates organic rhythms out of geometrical forms.

From his paper “Pretty Paper Rolls: Experiments in Woven Circuits” (also published in the Leonardo Music Journal – Volume 17, 2007, pp. 25-27):

The transcription of electronic ideas onto paper stimulates a free and open distribution of craft, where the final pieces vary based on the skills of the maker. This appeals to an ideal of medieval individuality, where information is distributed personally through guilds as well as mnemonically in spellbooks and mandalas. The paper circuit projects attempt to bring the art of electronics from an impersonal, industrial approach to one which is individual and magical. This crafty use of electronics encourages everyone who pursues it to personally reduce waste; creativity leads to resourcefulness and vice versa.