Fibercuit: Prototyping High-Resolution Flexible and Kirigami Circuits with a Fiber Laser Engraver
We presents Fibercuit, a suite of techniques to fabricate high-resolution flexible circuits suitable for rapid prototyping. In this work, we re-purpose the fiber laser engraver to fabricate custom flexible circuits.
We showcase the laser cutting workflow to fabricate standard flexible circuits, as well as a suite of additional techniques using the fiber laser engraver to solder SMD components and fabricate circuits with kirigami shapes.
These techniques are unique to fiber laser machines and, when combined, allow us to fabricate circuits with greater varieties in size, stiffness, and malleability; The copper traces made with Fibercuit are also high-resolution (as low as 8 mils), which, to the best of our knowledge, was typically achieved only in professional workflows in the past.
We report the configuration of the machine, the process of preparing custom circuit composites, and the techniques we have developed to enable the fabrication of flexible circuit boards.
We also introduce a software interface that allows an end user to design custom circuits on kirigami shapes by simulating and visualizing the folding process. The software also generates the vector files required by the fiber laser engraver to fabricate the kirigami circuit.
We conclude with several fabricated examples that highlight the benefits of our method, along with a discussion of the limitations of our approach and possible future improvements.
Created by:
Zeyu Yan, Anup Sathya, Sahra Yusuf, Jyh-Ming Lien, Huaishu Peng
Publications:
ACM UIST 2022 DEMO
News:
🏆ACM UIST 2022 Best DEMO