conductive adhesives?

I notice in [www.inhabitat.com] that there is talk of conductive adhesives. I wonder if these would be useful in the never ending quest to enable RepRap to build itself - and in particular to build circuit boards and attach components to them.

David

I've used conductive adhesives (mostly silver with an acrylic resin) to do emergency repairs, but never for an entire circuit. The adhesives usually have a high resistance, which is an issue if you are moving a lot of power through them.
I did try it one time on a trace from an L298n to a stepper motor - the adhesive lasted about 10 seconds and the motor didn't run well during those few seconds.

I've used a conductive adhesive, which is basically a RTV with loads of silver in it, it has very low resistance and is quite expensive.

Certainly not a suitable glue for which you can solder after.

Loctite do sell a conductive epoxy laced with silver, I dunno how easy it is to solder to, but your welcome to try

I had this brilliant notion once to use conductive ink to draw traces on acrylic plastic instead of using enchant and copper boards. It "worked" but to be able to solder connectors you have to cook the stuff and you've also got to watch out for shrinkage of the traces which can produce bad connections. The nice thing about solder/fields metal is that it will stretch and hold better ideally than an epoxy resin. It's also less likely to crack when you flex your work piece.

IMO with devices like a reprap, we could start seriously looking into different forms of computation that are easier to implement in the medium. For a mind trip, look up bubble logic [web.media.mit.edu], and fluidic logic [en.wikipedia.org]. If we ever get the build quality high enough, we could build into the objects we are using the logical structures necessary to do simple operations. Ah, dreams are nice.

... some years ago i developed a mikrodispenser capable of placing single droplets of high viscous fluids (e.g. toothpaste - look here: [dev.forums.reprap.org] ) down to sizes/diametres of 5 microns (i printed with 10 microns, but it's working down to submicrons).

It's not a really fast process, as you only have repetition-rates of max. 5 Hz for small droplets or 1-2 Hz for bigger ones.

With conductive fluids and pastes and a multi-head setup this should be doable soon enough

The fluidic logic and bubble logic articles linked to above have given me an idea: Could boolean logic operations be performed by hamsters in plastic tunnels?

... it could be possible, if you train the hamsters accordingly - but your CPU will will be bigger than a soccer field

Better use slime fungus ... easier to train with´shugar and much, much smaller in dimension - maybe the footprint of a table with the option for 3D-stacking and -connecting logic layers

Viktor