Patchduino
Electronic components in the format of stickers
Date: Feb 2013
Location: Stanford, CA
Project: InnoEx - ME 310
Team: Alexandre Jais, Daniel Levick, Hao Jiang, Si Jiang
Role: Concept design, Design Research
Patchduino was a protototype made during the ME310 Clariant project, at the beginning of winter quarter. Our big problem at the moment was to understand as to how exactly how people would and could quickly prototype in a tangible manner with electronics. The patchduino concept was for us a simple way to try that out on a sample of people: electronic components in a sticker format.
We prototyped this idea by building a few example use cases ourselves and then trying out the stickers by having Stanford Mechatronics student, who should be familiar with electronics complete challenges using them.
The most important learnings ended up being:
1. The ability to use the stickers to prototype in 3D was the most powerful aspect of such an approach.
2. The lack of expressivity of individual electronic components would call for modularized stickers that would create better ways to group components together and make stickers more functional directly.
3. The output of prototyping in such manner would be not robust enough to survive any handling by a user.
4. The restricted number of discrete components could potentially lead to very few possible use case. Especially as complex circuit can require a dozen type of different ICs, which would lead to very complex sticker arrangements.
This made use try to explore more integrated ways to prototype the interaction between circuit manufacturing and its integration with a 3d shape and eventually led to our 3d circuit printer explorations.
Lastly Patchduino, allowed us to quickly prototype an online innovation platform architecture.
The stickers and a simple functional sketch.
Wearable Flashlight prototype !
More prototypes including a musical hammer !
Testing session with mechatronics students
Example challenge given during the testing session.