The pen draws wires on paper with silver ink. Photo: Bok Yeop Ahn
Professors Jennifer Lewis and Jennifer Bernhard at the University of Illinois have come up with a way to draw circuits with a pen.
Not circuit diagrams. Any old pen can do that. No, the pen is a rollerball with silver ink that can actually draw real, working circuits. The ink dries to leave silver trails behind on the paper, and these are tough enough to survive bends and folds and still conduct electricity. And it doesn’t need to be paper. You can write on anything that will hold the ink.
Thus you can sketch a circuit, hook up components with crocodile clips and do anything you could do with a breadboarded circuit or even a proper circuit board. You’re only limit is how small you can scribble.
Next up in the project is the loading of other conductive materials, but the tech has already been co-opted for use as art. A sketched copy has been made of a painting by artist Jung Hee Kim. The lines of the drawing — a house and trees — becomes the wiring to connect an LED on the house’s roof.
Silver pen has the write stuff for flexible electronics [University of Illinois via Twitter]
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