openMaterials

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. The LED dragon kite: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1414 SMA origami crane: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1448

Thermochromic and waterproof polyester fabric (image by Inventables) Heat Reactive Materials Heat reactive materials change state, shape and/or color when exposed to temperatures above ambient. Naturally, many materials change shape, eg. melt, at high temperatures. What’s special about some of them is that their state, shape and/or color can be altered at relatively low temperatures (provided through [...]

The first edition of Botacon took place last weekend in Brooklyn. The lineup of speakers was impressive and made for one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. But one materials-related presentation stood out. Mr. Kim and John Sarik gave a talk titled “MakerBot Printable Transistors and OLEDs or I want to be Jeri Ellsworth [...]

Here’s an introductory video about polymorph- How to bend sheets of polymorph- How to add colour to polymorph-

I keep thinking that even though we tend to use conductive fabric and other soft circuits materials mostly for wearables and such, there has to be much more to it than that. Ayman’s drumsticks are a great of example of other interesting applications for these materials. He made them for his iPad iSteelPan application, but [...]

I’ve learned that there are 3 main challenges in working with soft circuits. The first one is to create circuitry with materials that are almost always completely exposed: a lot of thought goes into the layout of the circuit to not only avoid accidental shorts during normal wear, but also to avoid crisscrosses between conductive [...]