openMaterials

Medialab Prado initiatives are always great and we highly recommend that you attend as many as you can. This weekend they’ve started two very interesting materials/bio-related workshops: Rescued Circuits is a set of 3 mini-workshops dedicated to exploring new ways of reusing electronic materials. The series is organized by the Obsoletos project: Obsoletos is a project [...]

Researchers at Europe’s Atomic Energy Commission, in France, have shown that vibrations from raindrops can generate enough energy to operate certain low power wireless sensors. The findings could help improve networks of wireless sensors that measure conditions like temperature, pressure, or the presence of pollutants. These networks provide early warning systems for dangerous air [...]

AltLab has been trying to go greener so a few of us decided to start making and using more paper arduinos. They’re based on board designs by Guilherme and use paper and cardboard instead of PCBs - we call them paperduinos :) Monica’s version is embedded on a box where she keeps the connected batteries, [...]

Researchers Elvira Fortunato and Rodrigo Martins from the New University of Lisbon (my alma matter!), developed a resistor that can change the color of any material: paper, polymers, glass, ceramics, metal, you name it. The technology actually consists in a solution, composed of electrochromic nano particles, i.e. the transistor and the pixel are one and [...]

Ricardo Webbens recently showed me how simple it is to make eco-friendly cardboard circuits. Looking at these beautiful paper boards, I became particularly interested in exploring the aesthetic qualities of this technique. See ciat-lonbarde’s site for many more truly amazing paper circuits.

InnTex is doing some pretty interesting work on interactive textiles. First they developed a matrix pressure activated fabric: it uses knitted fabric for textile structure, tin copper or stainless steel/polyester for augmentation, and is made out of an inner non-conductive layer and two outer conductive layers, allowing for the circuit to close when the outer [...]