Seeeduino Film, maybe the first Arduino(TM) compatible board on FPC
It’s an interesting and hard process to discover the different ways of boards.
We tried to design an Arduino(TM) compatible board fits to smallest apertures. The goal is extremely small, slim, flexible while maintaining its nature of developing board.
Features:
Cut-able, Scrollable and Chain-able
Full functional Atmega168/328 breakout
USB-Serial interface
Built-in charger circuit
Default a complete Arduino compatible board, could be cut to fit needs
20pin bus passed across all blocks
Pros found:
light, slim, small, flexible as planned
Cons found:
Fragile
Too slim to fit in the connectors
Might still be too much overhead
Next steps
It is far from mature, we will prepare a few prototypes for community inspiration. Please let us know how you might use them and the key factors you would care, we will select the comments and ship them in one week frame. Thanks!
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Put this into a baseball cap, together with a GPS receiver.
Perfect for Openstreetmapping 🙂
I like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!how much will cost? i will buy 1 or 2 of this to make my watch and my ps2 wireless controller .
this is small and weightless,this could be used in my water sensor project
I’m interested in rcoketry, so I would use them to build the in-board telemetry hardware.
The flexible boards would permit fitting them around the inside of the fuselage, allowing a greater packing density and leaving more room for payloads.
I’m currently working on a framework for open, hackable consumer electronics called SSG — skin, skeleton, guts — which allows ordinary users to combine modules of electronics together to form real-life usable products which are more robust, more customized, and most importantly, can be re-mixed into a new updated version without having to buy all new components (and therefore, generate less waste).
Flexible circuit board construction is important in this framework for two reasons. First, it can flex slightly to fit the form factor of a variety of exterior skeleton and skin configurations. For example, the guts of an SLR might be squeezed into a flip-style video camera, giving different functionality for similar guts with different skeleton and skin.
You can check out a prototype version of this concept at The Humblefactory:
http://www.humblefactory.com/search/label/SSG Design
I’ve been awarded a TED fellowship at this summer’s TED Global for this work, and I’ll be presenting a watch concept based on Bre Petis’s Makerbot Watch — I would love to mention the seeedstudio work as well, and a sample would go a long way to giving me conversation topics when I talk with DIY big-wigs like Neil Gershenfeld.
I’m actually doing a bunch of work right now that involves Unmanned areal vehicles. I’m focused on search and rescue as well as humanitarian uses. This would greatly help shave the weight on the unit allowing for larger and more complex payloads.
Our work will be presented at Defcon in a few weeks and these would certainly help solve some of the issues with weight as well as structural integrity (less to hollow out of the airframe). I can see this technique allowing us to put cheap and relatively expendable UAV’s in the hands of disaster relief and search and rescue in a very short timeframe.
A sample would be awesome and certainly be mentioned in the presentation
Its flexibility makes it a natural for clothing, as earlier posters have remarked, but to me, the accordion shape suggests a use in a collapsible paper lantern design that would use LEDs to illuminate it. I would also like to try experimenting with it in origami-like structures.
If you can’t manage to get the entire circuit flexible, a compromise would to make the strips connecting the boards to be flexible.
Key Factor: Since its flexible, the number 1 priority should be durability. These boards should last as long as the normal Arduino boards, or your customers will feel cheated. To do this, you may need to compromise on flexibility so that perhaps each square is stiff, but the ribbon connecting them is flexible.
Potential Uses: I think I would put it on a RC battery inside of an RC car. They have pretty small dimensions, but since this board is so small, I would be able to squeeze it where any other board wouldn’t fit. I would then connect the driving servo and the motor controller (ESC) to it and drive it around 🙂
I would then put a review up on my site, showing the flexibility and durability of the newest Arduino.
First thing that comes to my mind:
Arduino Wristwatch!
This could reside in the band, and use a small rigid board for the watch face/display.
Or perhaps a tracking collar…
Using this controller and some flexible solar panels as a power source (controlled charging of a battery through the Adruino) I would like to create a bicycle (Ski, skate, etc…) helmet that holds, charges, and controls an iPod. Featuring volume, track selection, and other useful buttons mounted on the outside of the helmet, and of course hidden headphones in the ear pads.
I see these as being awesome for a “sixth sense” controller in low-flex clothing – like a hat with sensors to determine temperature and pressure or something integrated with a wrist wearable environmental display.
nice…
it would be wonderful do some experiments with this and some performance clothes and fashiontech pieces of my friends
I would immediately say that you guys should throw a lipo charging circuit and socket in there. Also, you guys should make available a socket on the edge (for another FPC board) that has the AVRISP connections on it. Then include with the kit a board that has that broken out to a standard AVRISP. I would happily beta test for you guys any day of the week.
ohh… finally!! guys I’d like to say THANK YOU very much & please-please put it into PRODUCTION!! IMHO this is THE board for 21st century; well done!! if I’ve got one I’ll first of all stick it to my small rocket airframe to use like a timer/altimeter for chute depl. mechanism. so if you got some – I’ll be glad to test it in extreme rocketry conditions;)) cheers!!
Really want one as this would finish off my plan for my summer ball outfit perfectly.
Next summer when i finish my electronics degree i’ve decided i want a one off outfit for the ball that sums me u perfectly as a geek, but still need a fancy evening dress. So i’m learning to sew, so i can make a dress and embed a lilyPad and surface mount LED’s as crystals into it, but could make it an amazing outfit with something like this embedded in a fabric lacy type cuff with more surface mount LEDs also connecting a bluetooth module to have it display if my phone needs attention as it’ll need to be in my bag so i wont be able to see if i get a email, message or phone call, which is worrying as i don’t like not being connected!
Please bring it out on the market as i really need it for the above reasons!
Mmm, wearable arduinome comes to mind, now we only need some slim silicon pads to go with it, and to make it really useful, some interface to detach the Arduino from a computer, maybe in two parts:
Battery powered Arduino + xbee on the performer side, xbee + Arduino sequencer/midi out software combo, this way you can hook up to whatever music hardware with midi ports you want to!
Wow These look just what I need for my semi autonomous Blimp. Every gram I save allows a smaller envelope and this means it more maneuverable. Ive made motor controllers PCB’s from the ultra thin PCB stock ex Goldmine Electronics
I am working on a wearable posture monitor. Currently using LilyPad, but this one looks like a better fit. It may even stay on top of the flex sensor. Good job!
It’s sound perfect for a project i’ve been thinking . A micro-qudrucopter drone with four motor from those picoz microhelicopters and an accelerometer.It woulbe like an 30 g
drone with 25 minutes of stabile flight even with an microcamera mounted on.The possibilities are infinites.
I am from Romania, sorry for bad english. Good luck with development and maibe you can put in it an motor h bridge.
This is perfect!
This is exactly what I need for making sculptures and kids toys more interactive. Being flexible is really the key here; it would be inside of a hard structure, so as long as it can be secured, it could fit nearly anywhere without worrying about it getting damaged. Using a flexible board like this would mean that I wouldn’t need to design the toy around the board, but I could instead make the toy however I wanted, and then fit the board to with little trouble.
There are so many possibilities with this. Everything from adding programmable lights for glowing ‘eyes’, to motion sensors to have it react differently based on how close you are. These are going to be great! you definitely have to start making them!
And all of that doesn’t even get into any of the great stuff you could do just because it’s light and small. Smaller remote controlled or autonomous blimps and weather balloons.