I’m looking at new methods to interfacing with paper, with Bare as my main ingredient.

I’ve spent the day processing the ink in different ways to see if I can get a response on my computer.

My hardware set-up in an Auduino Leonardo hooked up to my laptop. The ardunio communicates to the paper with only 1 analog pin combined with +ve & -ve.

Exploiting the resistive properties of the ink, I’m trying to return 3 or more distinct values from a length of ink track by bridging connections (using a soft graphite pencil) at various points.

Other Exploration

Laser peforated Paper.

I was hoping that drawing on this with a graphite pencil would conduct from the front to the rear side (blacked out with conductive ink). Thus far, not much has come of this. Even with a selection of mesh sizes I wasn’t getting any substancial results. I think this has some potential with making dual layer paper circuits. I will come back to this!

Using graphite as a conductor between 2 points of Bare

It worked, very well actually.

Now, utilising Bare Conductive’s resistive properties, as mentioned earlier, many contact points could be sensed from just 3 pins (maybe 2). I recon up to 6 could be sensed. The issue is that the ink’s resistance varies so greatly with different widths of track and depth. Manually painting makes this almost impossible to control. Automating e.g via screen printing is far too labour and time intensive to effectively prototype. Screen printing just one card could take 5 hours. The plus side, is that screen printing 100 cards takes about 6 hours as most of the time is spend preparing surfaces and screens.