Carbomorph 3D Printing with conductive polymer
My first 3Dprinting with Carbomorph... It's the school holidays so I have a little bit of spare time to get down to some serious 3D printing!
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be contacted by Simon Leigh from the School of Engineering at Warwick University, he wondered if I would like to try out some of their new printable conductive polymer "Carbomorph". At that stage the research hadn't been published so it was all a bit hush-hush and a rather busy time in school meant that I didn't have much time to play. With Simon's permission I was able to discuss with some of my students how Carbomorph could be used and coincidentally one of my GCSE Product Design students is looking at designing new ways of controlling his iPad .... And an idea was seeded in my brain... Could Carbomorph control a capacitive touch screen? After some simple tests the answer was yes! So, after a quick bit of designing using PTC Creo2 and processing the files for multi material prints in Bits from Bytes Axon 3 I was able to print my first version of a touch screen stylus.... Although its not the most elegant or ergonomic design it does actually work.
Hopefully next term Simon Leigh will be able to visit us at Clevedon School and my students can share some of their ideas of how they would 3D print with Carbomorph.... And maybe Simon will explain to the students how Carbomorph was developed. We are really looking forwards to meeting up.
And finally I would like to thank Simon for letting us have some samples of Carbomorph... And letting us be some of the very first people to use it outside of the university.
The research paper can be found here http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0049365

