Made Us Look: A Pen That Doodles Working Circuits
Wouldn’t middle school have been a lot cooler if our gelly roller pens could have made our notebooks light up? A whole generation may now have electrifying doodles with these Circuit Scribe Pens.
https://youtu.be/f2yp-Ee99Lk
Created by ElectronInks Incorporated out of lab of Professor Jennifer Lewis’ lab at the University of Illinois. These pens currently use the shells of Sakura Gelly Roll Metallic Pens (yes, the same ones that decorated countless notebooks with names, kitty drawings, and emoticons before emoticons existed) to easily draw and doodle using their special electricity conducting ink.
The end result is a working electrical circuit on a plain old piece of paper! That means making a simple circuit just got a whole lot easier and requires far fewer wires and boxy pieces of specialty equipment.
The ink in the prototype pens is non-toxic, water-based, and silver in color. Each gelly roll pen is cleaned by hand before the special prototype ink is added to it and pushed to the tip using compressed air.
The truly special thing about Circuit Scribe is how easy it is to use. For the maker using it, it’s just like writing with a pen! And with their Kickstarter you also get the chance to have their reusable magnetic circuit parts and a special notebook. Oh and be sure to check out their illuminating “circuit stickers“!
Care to know how this spectacular ink is made? Check out this video!
Can you imagine all of the great projects you could use this for? Not to mention how useful this would be in classrooms to make the concepts of circuitry accessible. What would you use this for?
