Conductive Paste

What if we extruded this conductive dough (http://www.sparkfun.com/news/626) into printed circuit boards?

I wonder how much you could thin it with water. Then you could use a syringe system, but you would need a heat source to remove the water. Ideally a 'hot air' head .. (or compressed air through a hot end nozzle?)

Take a look at :

[bareconductive.com]

This paint on conductive material not only provides a conductive circuit but can be used for capacitance and resistance also. What a jackpot this opens????


Just a thought,

Yzr1

Instead of trying to paint on conductive material, why not print on normal resist ink with a syringe system and etch the board normally? I'm new to this sort of thing, but I don't see why it would not work.

For me, the attraction of printing conductive matirials is that you could easily have vias (blind and burried as well) that are electicaly connected, and you could set up boards that have more than 2 layers (ie top and bottom).

for traditional DYI two layer boards are the max you can do is two layers (even thoes are tricky) and your are hard to get connected (takes a long time with a soldering iron).

If you stick a wire through the via and use two types of solder (one higher temp and solder that one first it's easier just an FYI.
although I like the idea of conductive inks, albeit I would like to go a mixture route either copper based or carbon based this way we can print the resistors right on the board. But I would like it to be something that we could make ourselves. But as of right now not many people are cooperating. thinking of something with an alcohol solvent that would evaporate quickly so it would harden quickley, we could then also with a syringe use the copper based stuff to put the chips into contact, abbeit many would need a good magnifying glass a base that could stand up to higher temps would be good as long as most of it would be copper on one end and carbon for resistive traces. could print the vias layer by layer and it should work
I started a topic like this a few days ago my thread however no one has responded as of yet
terramir

Step by step? Get your existing electronics working first?

I'm also fascinated by the idea to print circuits, but that's a long way to go. Even a single track printed would be a big success.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY