One of [Chris Hamilton]’s entries for The Hackaday Prize deals directly with his job. He works at Fyber Labs designing wearable and flexible electronics. While anyone can go out and buy some flex sensors and every large board house can make flex PCBs, there aren’t many people building flexible products, and even fewer are creating the tools to build these wearable electronics. To solve this problem, [Chris] is building Flex Modules, circuit boards that combine the ease of use of breadboard-compatible modules with something that can be placed on a flexible PCB.
This is a toolkit for [Chris] and he already has a ton of modules that are either completed or in the works. The Flex Sensor ADC Buffer and Filter is meant to read flexible sensors, the STM32F401 module puts an incredibly powerful microcontroller in these projects, and the 12axis module gives these projects pressure, humidity, gyro, and temperature sensors. There are over two dozen modules [Chris] is working on, and each of them work with his system for flexible electronics.
If you’d like to see an example of what these modules can do, check out the Dance Kit [Chris] built. It’s a wearable LED strip with motion feedback and bioelectric monitoring. Without being flexible, this project would be a huge unwieldly mass of circuit boards. With these modules, it was easy to create a wearable solution to the problem.
Possible uses in artificial limbs?
Nope
They look great. Now any flex toner transfer out there?
Oh, and now his modules are gone from the voting page, but I still get the same few repeated. I am starting to think this is on purpose, how hard could it be to randomize them?
From what I am seeing, if you choose not to vote for a given pair of entries (say, if you don’t feel like either of them is worth it), then they both keep coming back. Try hitting refresh a bunch of times, and note the projects that you see; there is a small set (10-ish) which are randomly picked from. Once you start voting, others get pulled into the mix.
I assume this is working as expected (it would be much easier to just do a random selection every time), and it probably there to encourage people to look at other projects rather than just vote for their personal favourites and / or the projects they already know about.
Toner transfer is very easy with copper clad Kapton. You don’t need to adjust the laminator height and it takes less heat to work. In fact, I have had really good results with a Harbor Freight laminator and a Samsung laser jet.
I can second that.
I also tried printing directly to the copper clad kapton using a Xerox Phaser. It’s a printer that uses a type of wax for ink. While it worked OK for small circuits it wasn’t nearly as reliable as toner transfer.
Yes! these are awesome, they came up over 10 times in 2015 hackaday prize voting as well, so they probably got hammered with votes.
I am very interested in these and wish you luck in expanding your arsenal of modules.
Thanks, we will be working on more modules and more demo projects soon.