Circuit Scribe is a rollerball pen that writes with conductive silver ink. It makes creating circuits as easy as doodling.
Draw Circuits Instantly
Circuit Scribe is for Makers, STEM Educators, Artists, Kids, & Life Hackers. We wanted to make it easier for Makers to Make.No shaking, no squeezing, no goop, no smell, no waiting for ink to dry. Circuit Scribe draws smooth lines with conductive silver ink and allows you to create functioning circuits instantly.
Invent Instantly
Circuit Scribe is for Makers of all ages and skill sets.
STEM Education: Circuit Scribe was made for project based learning. Kids can build circuits and switches in their notebooks and use those concepts to get creative!
Low-Cost High Quality Electronics: You can build a circuit with nothing but a coin battery, paper clip, and LED, or build out complex circuits with multiple components.
Flexible Electronics: Draw your circuits, cut them out, and stuff them into your inventions - instant robot guts.
Goodbye Breadboard: Breadboards add a level of abstraction and annoyance to circuit building. With Circuit Scribe you can draw exactly what you want, no wires or breadboard required.
Open-Source Hardware: You can use Circuit Scribe with Arduino, Makey Makey, and many other electronic platforms.
We wanted to make creating with Circuit Scribe even easier for our KICKSTARTER backers, so we developed a series of electronic components just for you! These components will snap directly onto the page as long as you have something magnetic behind them, such as a refrigerator door, small piece of steel, magnet, etc. The components depicted are prototypes, the design of the final components may be a little different.
We’re really excited to see what you come up with! We've been working on Circuit Scribe for a few years now, and we can't wait to take it from prototype to product!
Right now we brew small batches of ink and fill each pen by hand. We need KICKSTARTER’s help to scale up our ink production and fill our first order of pens. We want Circuit Scribe to be affordable, so we need to manufacture them at a large scale. We've found a USA manufacturer who will work with us to produce batches of pens, but we need your help to make it happen! We've put together some Kits for our backers that make it easy to learn & build with Circuit Scribe. The components depicted are prototypes and will evolve as we hear your feedback and develop the final designs. We can't wait to see what you make!
Thank You for helping us reach our goal! We can't wait to get Circuit Scribe out to our Backers!!
Stretch Goal:
No matter what, we are going to continue our STEM outreach and build an online education site for Circuit Scribe. But if we can raise $250,000 we can make the robust, user-friendly education portal of our dreams! We'd like to build a platform for kids, educators, & makers with activities, lesson plans, and user-submitted projects. We'd also like to do more workshops & outreach events. In order to do this we'll need to expand our team and work with educators to develop more low-cost, high-quality electronics projects that are fun for kids and teachers. Please help us reach our goal!
KICKSTARTER BACKERS:
Give Circuit Scribe as a gift!
Do you want to give Circuit Scribe or a Kit to a teacher, school, kid, or friend? You can print out this "Gift Certificate" so they have something to unwrap for the holidays! Just fill in the Pledge Level to let them know what you got them. Unfortunately we cannot ship to multiple addresses, so we'll ship the reward to you and you can deliver the gift in person.
The Story Behind Circuit Scribe
Electroninks Incorporated is a spin-off company from the research lab of Professor Jennifer Lewis located in the Research Park at the University of Illinois. We’re all about creating low-cost, high-quality electronics. We wanted to get electronics into people's hands and thought that using things as ubiquitous as pen and paper was just the way to do it. So we've developed a non-toxic, water-based, conductive silver ink for use in rollerball pens. Back in 2011 we published a paper in Advanced Materials:
Press Coverage
Our conductive ink was named Invention of the Month by Popular Science!
Technical Details
Circuit Scribe
We've done quite a bit of development work in order to make the pen you see in the videos. The prototype pens are Sakura Gelly Roll Metallic pens. We clean the pens by hand and refill them with the conductive silver ink. The ink has to be precisely tuned so that it flows just the right amount of ink in order to create a conductive circuit - otherwise it spreads into the paper too quickly or doesn't flow smoothly out of the pen.
The final design of the basic Circuit Scribe pen will look similar to the prototype displayed here and in the video. We plan to purchase the parts directly from Sakura or partner with them outright to manufacture the pens. The quality of the pen and the reasonable price make this the ideal choice for our ink. The rollerball pen design works really well, is cost effective, and we love the utilitarian simplicity of it. It also writes for a while (60-80 meters). The written lines achieve a conductivity of 50-100 milliohms per square per mil.
Components:
The final components will look very similar to the prototype components in the video & photos. We're working with a USA based manufacturer to produce these components and get them to you on time!
The LED component contains two different-colored LEDs, if you flip the component to change the direction of the current, the other LED will light up:
You can add your own resistors, capacitors, LEDs, and many other components to our 2 PIN board:
What would you build with Circuit Scribe? Let us know onFacebook!
SPECIAL THANKS:
Michael Bell, Electroninks Consultant, is a PhD student in the Lewis Research Group and is helping to design and develop the electronic components for the Circuit Scribe. Michael’s background is in computer and mechanical engineering, with extensive experience manufacturing electromechanical devices.
Steve Shewchuk Electroninks Incorporated Intern and UIUC MatSE Undergrad
Risks and challengesLearn about accountability on Kickstarter
As with many Kickstarter projects, we face several key risks and challenges by pursuing production of this pen. Primary risks include:
ENGINEERING
In order for the pen to work very easily for the end-user, we have spent a considerable amount of time designing and optimizing the ink to work reliably in the rollerball pen. As we work with a manufacturer to take Circuit Scribe from prototype to product, we will need to ensure that the functionality and reliability of the pen are never compromised.
LOGISTICS
This is perhaps the largest challenge of them all. Right now we produce the ink and load the pens on our lab, which means we have direct control over the quality of our product and our production timetables. In order to produce a large run of pens, several manufacturers must work in tandem to make this project a reality, which introduces many variables, potential complications and potential timeline setbacks. We will work directly with contract manufacturers to produce and optimize the ink, we will also work with pen manufacturers to produce and package the pens after the ink has been produced, and finally, we will work with the pen manufacturer to make sure the pens achieve the quality necessary for a finished consumer product that will write easily and reliably while producing conductive traces that dry quickly at room temperature. We already have a working relationship with the contacts listed to speed to development and manufacturing process to ensure timely delivery to our backers. Delivering a high quality product to our KICKSTARTER Backers is our number one priority.
