www.3ders.org

Oct. 9, 2014 | By Alec

Many of you who have ever worked on an interactive, electronic prototype with their 3D printers will have likely been frustrated with attempts to incorporate a nice display. With the advent of iPods and Smartphones, we've been getting increasingly used to smooth, thin electronics, but these effects are almost impossible to reproduce in your own projects without getting a second mortgage.

Affordable and readymade displays and touchscreens, meanwhile, tend to be bulky and only come in a few sizes. Before you know it, your original design is transforming to adjust to the limitations of the screens available. So what to do?`

Well, three German researchers attached to Saarland University, Simon Olberding, Jürgen Steimle, and Michael Wessely have created a solution: PrintScreen. This technology will allow anyone to 3D print custom, thin and flexible displays that can be affixed to just about any object you're working on. These thin-film electroluminescent (TFEL) displays can be touchscreens as well, making it possible to turn just about anything into an interactive object. Want to augment any piece of electronics, add a button to your desk or turn a sheet of paper into a Pong game? PrintScreen can do all this and much more.

As the researchers explained on their website, this technology 'enables inexpensive and rapid fabrication of highly customized displays in low volume, in a simple lab environment, print shop or even at home. We show how to print ultra-thin (120 um) segmented and passive matrix displays in greyscale or multi-color on a variety of deformable and rigid substrate materials, including PET film, office paper, leather, metal, stone, and wood.'

The printed nature of the PrintScreen, meanwhile, allows for a large level of customization. 'The displays can have custom, unconventional 2D shapes and can be bent, rolled and folded to create 3D shapes.' All this makes it a wonderful addition to any prototyping project. 'Instead of buying an off-the-shelf display, the designer can create a custom digital design, which meets the specific demands of the application, and then simply print the display,' according to their research paper.

How does it work? Well, you can just simply create a 2D digital design using regular graphics editing software, such as Adobe Illustrator. 'Each segment or pixel is created as if it was ordinary visual artwork, using the application's tools for creating lines, polygons, text, fills, etc. Hence, designing an interactive display is pretty much comparable to designing conventional 2D graphics.'

Before sending it to the 3D printer, software is needed to generate four adjacent copies of the design, each corresponding to the four layers that together form the screen. These can then be 3D printed onto objects or paper using and inkjet printer or silkscreen equipment: Each layer of the display stack is printed successively, from bottom to top. […] For multi-color displays, two or more layers of differently-colored phosphor are printed.' These four layers together contain all the necessary conducting elements necessary for forming a touch screen. Finally, a layer of acrylic insulating spray is used to cover the top layer. All in all, that adds some 110 μm to the substrate.

The 3D printed layers that make up the display screen.

Alternatively, similar results (albeit with a lower quality) can be created using a second fabrication process, in which a prefabricated display film is used during printing. This way, you can quickly and easily prototype some options, though even the first method isn't very time-consuming. The touchscreen effects, meanwhile don't even need an additional printing layer, as the same printed TFEL display can be integrated with different input sensing modalities.

Of course, this technology is still in its prototyping phase, but the developers promise to expand the possibilities for integrating these touchscreens with Arduino or Raspberry Pi and connecting it to a power source and integrated circuits. However, even at this stage they can project that prices for this interesting technology are going to be particularly low. An a4 size PrintScreen display would cost you about $32, mostly due to the cost of the conductive ink; so printing a touchscreen itself would only cost a few bucks.

While we will just have to wait and see how these will work in practise, the concept is nonetheless revolutionary. Like the creators rightly rote, it 'empowers designers and makers to create customized interactive print products, digital signage, smart objects, personalized computing devices, and crafts with embedded display.' Let's therefore hope that 3D printed touchscreens become available very quickly.

Also check out this informative video on PrintScreen:

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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