New Scientist. Inkjet printers for "spray on" displays. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Being able to spray on circuits is a very cool use of tech. Spary on nonconductive layers between your circuits and you can have some pretty dense cusctom circuitry in a small space. One of the problems is that the metal that is used has to be sprayed on hot, which precludes using plastic as a substrate. However, if the inkjet heads were filled with carbon nanotubes [2], they could be sprayed on cool and have conductivity similar to copper. This assumes that you can somehow line up the nanotubes as you spray them on.
For the home hobbyist, this could also lead to some serious effects for the garage shop, if tied in with my previous ideas on home manufacturing.
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10:47:03 AM
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