I See By Your Tattoo That You Are A Hacker

November 28, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 38 Comments

We spotted [Segfault]’s new tattoo on a fast failing bird app a few days ago. We thought it was nice looking piece of skin art, but without a write up couldn’t cover it. The bearer of the tattoo pointed us to this blog post about the tattoo, and now we really like it.

It’s fun on it’s own, but when you start staring at it you realize it’s full of hidden jokes and meanings. If you like puzzles, go hunting for them before you read the blog post. We also liked the reminiscence about [Segfault]’s early electronics experimentation days, and how the 555 timer IC figured prominently in them.

We’ve not covered a lot of tattoos here at Hackaday. Mostly we cover the technology behind skin fused or embedded hacks. But occasionally some tattoo art catches our eye, as it did in this interesting barcode tattoo.

Tracking Vaccination History With Invisible Tattoos

January 3, 2020 by Sharon Lin 57 Comments

Nowadays, we still rely on medical records to tell when our last vaccinations were. For social workers in developing countries, it’s an incredibly difficult task especially if there isn’t a good standard in place for tracking vaccinations already.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be providing a solution – they’ve developed a safe ink to be embedded into the skin alongside the vaccine, only visible under a special light provided by a smartphone camera app. It’s an inconspicuous way to document the patient’s vaccination history directly into their skin and low-risk enough to massively simplify the process of maintaining medical records for vaccines.

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Laser Welding With A Tattoo Removal Gun

December 25, 2019 by Lewin Day 49 Comments

Dating as far back as the early 1960’s, researchers were zapping tattoo inks with laser light was an effective way to remove the markings from human skin. At the time it was prohibitively expensive. But the desire to have an undo-button for badge choices is strong, and thus the tattoo removal gun was born.

These days you can pick up one of these zappy, burn-y wonders for far less than a flagship cellphone put their high-power-output to alternative use. [Andrew] recently discovered that these devices can be readily repurposed into a laser welding tool with just a bit of work under the hood.

He first came across the technology via videos from [styropyro], whose work we’ve featured before. The tattoo removal gun features a YAG laser, which is pulsed to create a high power density. In initial testing, the pulses were too short and of too high intensity to effectively weld with; instead, the pulses simply cratered the metal.

After delving in further, [Andrew] discovered that by removing the Q-switch optical component, the pulses from the laser could be lengthened. This reduces the power density, and allows the tool to weld various materials even on its lower power settings. Success was found welding steel, titanium, and other materials, though attempts to weld copper and silver faced little success. Test pieces included razor blades and small screws, which could easily be welded with the tool. Results of the razor blade welding is spectacular, with a high-quality welding bead achieved by taping the laser to a CNC mill for precise movement.

It could prove to be a useful tool for those experimenting with complex projects involving bonding metals at very fine scales. If you’re pursuing something exotic yourself, we want to hear about it!

Imitating Art In Life With A Reverse-Engineered Tattoo

March 23, 2019 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

In general, tattoo artists are not electrical engineers. That’s fine; the world needs both professions. But when you need a circuit designed, you’re better off turning to an EE rather than a tattoo artist. And you certainly don’t want an EE doing your new ink. Disaster lies that way.

Surprisingly, [Missa]’s tattoo of a heart-shaped circuit turned out at least to be plausible design, even if it’s not clear what it’s supposed to do. So her friend [Jeremy Elson] took up the challenge to create a circuit that looked like the tattoo while actually doing something useful. He had to work around the results of tattoo artistic license, like sending traces off to the board’s edge and stranding surface-mount components without any traces. The artist had rendered an 8-pin DIP device, albeit somewhat proportionally challenged, so [Jeremy] went with an ATtiny85, threw on a couple of SMD resistors and a cap, and placed two LEDs for the necessary blinkenlights. Most of the SMDs are fed from traces on the back of the board that resurface through vias, and a small coin cell hidden on the back powers it. One LED blinks “Happy Birthday [Missa]” in Morse, while the other blinks prime numbers from 2 to 23 – we’ll assume this means it was [Missa]’s 23rd birthday.

There’s a surprising amount of crossover between the worlds of electronics and tattooing. We’ve featured functional temporary tattoo circuits, prison-expedient tattoo guns, and even a CNC tattoo machine.

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Tech Tattoos Trace Two Dimensions

January 5, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 7 Comments

Flexible circuit boards bend as you might expect from a playing card, while skin stretches more like knit fabric. The rules for making circuit boards and temporary tattoos therefore need to be different. Not just temporary tattoos, there are also circuits that reside on the skin so no unregulated heat traces, please. In addition to flexing and stretching, these tattoos can be applied to uneven surfaces and remain intact. Circuits could be added to the outside of projects or use the structure as the board to reduce weight and size. Both are possible with the research from Carnegie Mellon’s Soft Machines Lab and the Institute of Systems and Robotics at the University of Coimbra.

These circuits are an improvement over the existing method which relies on cropping away metal foil with a magnifying glass, tweezers and a steady hand. Instead, silver particles are printed with an inkjet printer before the traces are coated in eutectic gallium indium which is liquid metal at room temperature. If we were to oversimplify, we might describe it as similar to a non-toxic equivalent of mercury that we have also seen used in DIY OLEDs. This is a development likely to be interesting in a range of fields from medicine to cosplay.

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Tattoo Your 3D Prints With Velocity Painting

July 5, 2018 by Joshua Vasquez 9 Comments

Just when it seems like we’ve juiced all the creative potential out of our 3D printers, a bold new feature lands on the table. Enter Velocity Painting, a concept brought to life by [Mark Wheadon] that textures our 3D prints with greyscale images.

At its core, the technique is straightforward: skin an image onto a 3D print by varying the print speed in specific locations and, thereby, varying just how much plastic oozes out of the nozzle. While the concept seems simple, the result is stunning.

Velocity Painting opens up new ways of expression on top of an existing print with all the skinning opportunities. Imagine adding a texture for realism like this rook that’s been patterned with a brick layout, or imagine an aesthetic embellishment like the flames on [Mark’s] dragon print.

The results speak for themselves, and the growing number of users are proving it. Head on over to the gallery to indulge yourself in this delightful oozing aesthetic that’s sure to turn a few heads.

[Mark Wheadon’s] hack takes the mechanics of how we print and adds another creative tuning knob. If you’re looking for other embellishments for your prints, have a look at [David Shorey’s] work on texturizing fabrics.

Living 3D Printer Filament

December 22, 2017 by James Hobson 15 Comments

This is more than a printing filament hack — closer to bleeding edge bio-engineering — but we can’t help but be fascinated by the prospect of 3D printing with filament that’s alive on a cellular level.

The team from MIT led by [Xuanhe Zhao] and [Timothy Lu] have programmed bacteria cells to respond to specific compounds. To demonstrate, they printed a temporary tattoo of a tree formed of the sturdy bacteria and a hydrogel ‘ink’ loaded with nutrients, that lights up over a few hours when adhered to skin swabbed with these specific stimuli.

So far, the team has been able to produce objects as large as several centimetres, capable of being adapted into active materials when printed and integrated as wearables, displays, sensors and more.

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