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You don't have to have a PhD in electrical engineering to make nutty drawings,
but it helps if you do it using conductive ink and a 12 kV neon sign transformer.
The ink came from the Bare
Conductive company's Electric Paint product line that is supplied in a jar for brush
application or in a pen format. Evidently conductive paint is a big deal because
it was just back in February of this year (see "The Art of Technology") that I mentioned another Kickstarter
project called
Circuit Scribe that produced a similar product.
 "I created
a laminate of aluminum foil, 250 micron Mylar sheet (from "office" laminating pockets),
and oven baking paper. The picture of the cello was then drawn onto the baking paper
side with a Bare Conductive
ink pen. I then applied about 12,000V a.c. using a neon sign transformer (controlled
with a Variac), connected between the foil backing and the ink drawing. The image
is a 10 second exposure with a Nikon DSLR, capturing the partial discharge arcs."
Bare Conductive is in production with not just the aforementioned conductive
ink media, but also peripheral products for use in experimentation, including the
custom interface circuit board shown below. I doubt the Electric Paint is meant
to be incorporated into commercial gadgets, but is intended primarily as a teaching
tool. However, depending on the robustness of the conductive paint or time, temperature,
and mechanical stress, I can easily envision it being used to seal off breaches
in Faraday shields
in both production and field repair situations. It might also be useful while designing
and troubleshooting circuits to fix broken PCB traces or to 'draw' in new trial
interconnections. Not long ago there was an article in the ARRL's QST magazine where
a Ham used a standard spray can of metallic paint to create an ad hoc antenna during
a DX contest. Maybe an Electric Paint pen in your
bug-out kit might be a good addition just in case all else fails
during an emergency.
Bare Conductive is a British company that sells direct or through distributors,
including
Amazon.com.
Posted September 3, 2014
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