Bare Paint is said to be the world's first nontoxic electrically conductive paint. The paint creates a liquid wiring across all surfaces with the exception of skin. It can function as both a cold solder and adhesive, able to serve as quick repair kit for fixing printed circuit boards and broken wiring on fly. Simply pop out a Bare Paint pen, color in the space between the components, and you have yourself a power flow.
Using Wikipedia as their primary source of information, a group of students from the Royal College of Art in London developed the project. The goal all along was to create a product that could serve as an exciting and safe platform for learning about electronics, experimenting, and prototyping. Bare Paint is safe enough to use in the classroom and easy enough to be included in any repair kit.
Signaling and powering
General uses for Bare Paint are divided into two categories: powering and signaling. Powering refers to lighting LEDs and driving small speakers, while signaling indicates using the paint as a conduit in a larger circuit, as a capacitive sensor, and as a potentiometer while interacting with a microcontroller. In any case, these functions may be combined in any way you deem possible. Tutorials, available at BareConductive.com, include projects such as creating lit-up holiday cards, painting capacitors, making light-up clothing, touch sensitive circuits, and even a capacitive proximity sensors, to name but a few.
The paint is interfacing with a microcontroller
Different ways of connecting to Bare Paint
It's extremely easy to connect anything using the paint; to light up an LED on a piece of paper, all you have to do is draw two lines from the LED's legs up to the positive and negative sides of a battery.
For a slightly more interesting approach, try attaching a battery clip holder to ends of the battery and then solder paperclips on to each end of the protruding wires. Finally, join the paper clips with piece of paper with the painted surface leading to the LED and it will light up.
To connect to a hard surface, glue a magnetic to a portion of the wall painted with Bare Paint. Next, solder a washer onto a piece wire attached to a battery. After the magnetic attracts the washer, an electric pathway is established.
Paint's qualities
Bare Paint is water based, but not waterproof; to achieve this quality it must be painted over with waterproof paint or varnish. Additionally, black is the only available color, but the paint can be painted over using any material. As a final note, the surface resistivity of the paint is approximately 55 Ω/square at a thickness of 50 microns.
Visit BareConductive to view the various kits, tutorials, and news pertaining to Bare Paint.
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