Even the Wikipedia entry[1] seems to list examples, most of which don't entirely rely on the flexibility of the device. I can understand the need for space savings, but that seems to be achievable for most of these applications without the flexible component.
For most wearables I've seen (clothing or devices worn directly on the body), FPCs don't seem to solve anything - you still have some bulky components, and the truly flexible parts need to be handled with extra care so as not to damage connections. I mean, clothing with built-in fitness monitoring (or GPS or whatever) sounds cool, but current implementations really seem to miss the practicality ("how am I supposed to wash this again?") of truly "invisible" technology.
Can someone point me to some better practical applications?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_electronics#Applicati...
There's a lot of interesting work being done on the flexible board technologies themselves. AgIc and others are supplying the tools for personal fabrications of flex circuits. It's way cheaper today to prototype using inkjet printed copper on PET than normal PCBs.
Finally, there is a little distinction between traditional FPC technology, where discrete components are placed on a kapton-based film, and printed electronics technologies, the idea of producing electronics components ranging from transistors, batteries, displays, memory, antennas or sensors. Printoo uses a hybrid approach since Printed Electronics are not yet mature enough to provide the full solution.
Sorry for the lengthy reply!
FPCs have been around for many decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_electronics#History
I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't go for bare die versions of ICs like the MCU, since COF is another quite-established technology for cheap flexible electronics.
Lets say you have an idea to make intelligent boarding passes for airports. With Printoo, you can make a prototype using electrochromic displays to tell you how long you have before boarding and/or how far away you are from your gate. You can have printed batteries powering the system. You can have Bluetooth for positioning and synch with the servers. It's not going to look exactly like a boarding pass, but it'll be a much closer approximation than would be possible with any other proto board and it will use technologies that would make sense for that. You would most likely be able to make and code a mock intelligent boarding pass, looking reasonably good, in under an hour.
At a second stage then you could design a custom board integrating these technologies and have concept prototype that would be much closer to a true boarding pass. We want to also help people have access to the right tools for this stage.
We thought that the current existing prototyping kits didn't offer the right form-factors to prototype product concepts for things like smart wearables and the high-volume internet of things (where intelligence is added to stickers, labels, packages, and so on).
Sorry for the long reply!
Their costs might also be particularly low, given that they are printing & laminating the circuits, and (clearly) already have the tech required to do that in place.
One other factor is that our company, and our partners in this project, really want to get these technologies out in the open for people to use and play around with. There is a lot of innovation happening with Printed Electronics but unfortunately it has mainly been kept within R&D labs and B2B. Developing this project was an investment we were willing to make mostly internally.
Thank you so much for the enthusiasm!
