Honest opinion of how useful this project is?

[AllenMPan]

Hi everyone!

My latest project is an electrically conductive mounting tack. I do work in STEAM education and was pretty desperate for a quick, solderless way to connect components together with the kids. I tried Bare Conductive paint, but that stuff kinda sucks cause it takes so long to dry and doesn't hold very strong.

So I  made this stuff and made a demo video for the Pitch Your Prototype Contest at MakerCon last month:


I didn't even place though, and the winning design ended up being smart juggling balls that changed color. I'd really appreciate some feedback from anyone who thinks this idea is great, stupid, or anything in between. Anyone here think this is worth developing further?

[larry42]

Interesring. Is the stuff toxic? In any case crocodile clips and also be used... Or solderless breadboard. I don't really see a use for it. If kids have a chance of becoming  engineers then they will need to be smart enough to figure out breadboard...

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[AllenMPan]

Thanks for the reply! It is entirely non-toxic. I've found that kids take really well to breadboards, but mostly as a follow along activity. Going from a circuit diagram to breadboard can be unintuitive, so I was looking for a way to close that gap.

[AndyC_772]

In your video you're building circuits with copper tape, which tends to have sharp edges. I hate using it myself for that very reason, and I certainly wouldn't try and get kids to use it. (You must have cut your fingers on it, right? Like a paper cut only 10 times worse.)

I guess you could just shove wires into the conductive tak instead (what's the contact resistance like?), but I'm really struggling to see the advantage over a solderless breadboard. If we're teaching electronics, why shy away from introducing the tools of the trade at the same time?

One useful exercise I remember from school was the time we built a transistor circuit on stripboard. That exercise combined relevant, appropriate practical skills with some theory, and at the end of the day we had something fairly robust and reliable to take home.

In other lessons we used components that had been mounted on plastic panels with 4mm banana sockets. The circuit symbol for the component was printed on one side, and the component itself was on the other. Circuits were built using leads with 4mm stackable plugs, and for the most part that method worked well. It's really easy to tap into a circuit built that way to attach meters too.

[Andy Watson]

Cool stuff, but I would have some safety concerns about it. What happens when the kids start applying it to more powerful batteries (as they surely will ), does it catch fire?
Also,  the video shows it being used as electrode to make contact with the skin, two problems here:
a) I don't think it is wise to encourage kids to experiment with connecting themselves to any circuit.
b) Passing DC (even µA) through the skin for any length of time will lead to burns due to electrolysis at the electrode site.

[AllenMPan]

Thanks for the replies!

I haven't had any accidents with copper foil tape (yet!), but I can see how one might get hurt from it. I wouldn't keep it away from the kids just cause it might cut them though, as many other tools are just as dangerous and they have access to those with no problem.

AndyC_772, the contact resistance is like 1k in the video, and since then I've gotten it down to less than 10ohms. Breadboards are great, but I wanted something that could stick a circuit onto nontraditional mediums, was visually a little more approachable, and was more efficient for a workshop or classroom environment. Even when using a mini 170 point breadboard, for simple circuits students typically leave a huge amount of the breadboard unused. In the past I've actually sawed those mini breadboards in half to save on cost.

Andy Watson, I haven't tested it in a high current short circuit situation, but I definitely should at some point! I doubt that it has any more of a fire risk than a regular high gauge wire. As for the use as an electrode, when we use educational tools like the MaKey MaKey or the Drawdio we always tell the students that they are special exceptions where electricity can safely pass through their body, and that they shouldn't assume that for any other device. As for burns, I haven't seen any evidence that short term exposure to miniscule currents is terribly damaging, though I have heard from people that practice transcranial dc stimulation that irritation of the skin can occur after several minutes of mA's passing through their heads

I really appreciate the feedback so far! It seems like the novelty of a conductive tack is intriguing but people would rather stick to tried-and-true prototyping techniques. Any other thoughts?

[Dongulus]

I think your idea would work great for teaching younger children electronics. I like the visual translation of the schematic diagram into a circuit directly on the paper and it seems to me that would be more intuitive than working with a breadboard for beginners. 

[mikeselectricstuff]

Potentially interesting but success and usefulness will depend at least as much on things like teaching resources to go with it as the tech itself.
 

[deth502]

interesting?, definitely. useful? ehhh, idk.

i will say that i do think it is MANY times more useful than color changing juggling balls.

[Flump]

could you use it to make the complete led circuit ?

I like the idea of it more for emergency temporary repairs of pcb
it's the sort of thing dr who would always carry on him!
and making circuits on paper is just  O0

[AllenMPan]

Thanks Dongulus! That's pretty much what I was going for, I just wish I had access to that ballpoint pen with conductive ink that was kickstarted a few months back. It'd be great to be able to draw the circuit with conductive ink and skip the copper tape altogether.

mikeselectricstuff and deth502, you guys make some good points. At the very least I'm glad my project is interesting! I guess the usefulness of any tool is in how it's used. Maybe if it was included as part of a larger kit for learning electronics?

Flump, if you mean making a circuit without foil tape and only conductive tack then yes, you could definitely do that! One thing I'd like to try is using the tack with smd parts; I'm sure with a steady hand you'd also be able to use it as a quick fix for pcb's.

Thanks again to everyone for your responses! It's really great to get these different perspectives.

[babysitter]

I give it a "highly interesting" rating! Working on interfaces where electronics have to touch up something else, this stuff would really complement my mini-bar of interesting stuff at work, which contains e.g. MABS solved in THF, childrens putty, epoxy resin based stuff, UV curing glues to make prototypes of something like "3D-MID".

Tell me as soon as it is available!

[miguelvp]

if you can make the consistency similar to solder paste so you could apply it with a syringe thin enough for smd work as you mentioned, then wow!

Btw those ink pens use silver as it's conductive material. there is some kickstarter or indigogo for a 2d printer that uses silver through an inkjet nozzle.

[tjb1]

RadioShack sells one of the conductive pens, CAIG CircuitWriter.

[Rigby]

I think your idea would work great for teaching younger children electronics. I like the visual translation of the schematic diagram into a circuit directly on the paper and it seems to me that would be more intuitive than working with a breadboard for beginners. 

Potentially interesting but success and usefulness will depend at least as much on things like teaching resources to go with it as the tech itself.

Agreed.  I think it is a good middle between drawing a circuit out and actually building it on a breadboard, and I think it will be best used when it is used to keep people on the path to a breadboard.  Draw something on paper, draw something with copper tape & conductak, breadboard something.

Like anything, the benefit will come from the application of the stuff, how it's used, not in the mere presence of the stuff.

[dannyf]

Anyone here think this is worth developing further?

I thought it is very interesting, and fairly well developed based on the video.

I would put more efforts into marketing it, like to schools. It may be helpful to develop some videos / demos so that teachers can use in classes. Maybe find a few schools in your area and work with the teachers to figure out how to do it. Put together a summer camp would be helpful as well.

Or sell it to other companies who have existing distribution channels to educational institutions.

[AllenMPan]

This forum has given me some great feedback. Thanks everyone!

dannyf and babysitter, once I've gotten new conductive materials shipped to me I might make a new video closer to 2 min and dip my toe into crowdfunding. Throw up a Kickstarter for a few hundred dollars or so just to pay for more materials to play with. So far I still can't really tell if a large crowdfunding campaign would gain any traction, so a mini-campaign might be nice to just check if the idea's worth any money at all.

tjb1 and miguelvp, the pen I was thinking of is called Circuit Scribe: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/electroninks/circuit-scribe-draw-circuits-instantly
I'd love to get my hands on one, but it looks like they won't even start shipping until August.

Rigby, I definitely agree that the students should eventually get to breadboarding. I didn't actually start using breadboards until high school, and even then I'd mix up the rows and columns at first. Imagine the next generation of engineers if they could start grasping and prototyping circuits in elementary school.

[rexxar]

This is a neat project. Coincidentally, I'm doing something similar.

I work at the public library, and for one of our summer reading programs, we're doing squishy circuits with 8-12 year olds. It's similar to what you've made, except the resistance is much higher. It's in the range of Kohms per square (cubic?) inch. It's also not tacky. I've also done programs with 11-13 year olds using breadboards, and they seemed to do okay with that, though it took a bit of explaining to get them to realize all the holes in the same row are common for some reason

Anyway, great work!