Daily Note: Sticker-Based Interactive Prototyping System

These notes are a summary of concepts presented in “Circuit stickers: peel-and-stick construction of interactive electronic prototypes.”

Steve Hodges, Nicolas Villar, Nicholas Chen, Tushar Chugh, Jie Qi, Diana Nowacka, and Yoshihiro Kawahara. 2014. Circuit stickers: peel-and-stick construction of interactive electronic prototypes. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1743–1746. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557150

  1. System Details
    • Adheres physical interface elements like LEDs, sounders, buttons, and sensors onto a conductive substrate
    • Supports quick, versatile, and cost-effective creation of flexible interactive prototypes
    • Particularly suited for experimenting with touch-sensing electrodes
    • Combines with existing systems to improve usability or expand design possibilities
  2. Substrate Properties
    • Provides electrical connectivity for attached circuits
    • Creation methods
      • Hand-crafted: Using conductive ink and paint
      • Digitally designed: Created on a computer and printed
    • Increased contact area enhances functionality and ease of use
  3. Sticker Types
    • Generic stickers
      • Contain single electronic component footprints (e.g., 0804 passive or SOT-23 transistor)
      • Ideal for connecting various components to prototype new ideas
    • Sub-circuit stickers
      • Designed for specific electronic devices, housing small groups of components
  4. Bus-based stickers
    • Primarily used for input and output, with computation, storage, and communication handled by external devices (e.g., microcontroller or PC)
    • Features
      • Inkjet-printed parallel traces form a 1-wire or I²C bus
      • Carries both power and data with corresponding interfaces
  5. Technical Specifications
    • Contact pads
      • Size: Typically 10-20 mm²
      • Minimum dimension: 1.5 mm
      • Spacing: At least 1 mm between adjacent pads
    • Sticker size
      • Minimum total size: 50 mm² for mechanical stability