Circuit printer: A rapid prototyping machine for electrical circuits
Another interesting micrcontroller-based design project done by Bruce Land‘s students at Cornell this fall is a circuit printer, a rapid prototyping machine that prints electrical circuits on a piece of paper. Designed by Connor Archard and Feiran Chen, this printer uses an electrically conductive ink pen to rapidly create circuits. The circuit to be printed is drawn through an Web-app and can be sent to the printer from anywhere in the local area network.
Circuit printer machine
As shown in the following demo video, the Web-app allows users to draw out circuits quickly, converts them into vectors and then send them out frame by frame over a WiFi network to the server, which in turn communicates with an Atmega1284P microcontroller embedded into the printer. The Atmega1284P then controls the x and y-axis motors, and raises and lowers the pen as instructed to print the circuit. By measuring the position of the plotter head on each axis through the on-chip ADC and two servo potentiometers, the Atmega1284P processor is able to control the plotter head with an accuracy of approximately 1/10th of an inch on a typical piece of A4 paper.
Connor and Feiran have the following vision about their project,
This idea is aimed to make mass prototyping circuits on flexible surfaces so cheap and easy, and we see a great potential for this product both in industry and remote education. For future improvement, we are thinking of supporting multi-layer, multi-dimension circuits, and designing our own mechanics and support frame for the machine.