These Cute creatures are Printegrated Circuits: fully functional 3D Printed digital devices with embedded PCBs.

Why? Low-volume production is hard. What if we could use the technologies already available, to make making interactive devices easier, more customisable and scalable?

This project’s goal was to explore how off-the-shelf digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing can support people engage with materials in craft-like way and lower barriers to making scalable hardware.

Printegrated Circuits pair general-purpose microcontroller-based PCBs like dev-boards and prototyping platforms with 3D printed structures printed out of conductive and non conductive PLA.

What? Digitally designed multi-material parts can be used to do different kinds of sensing: capacitive touch, contact, or resistance based. Printed 3D structures offer a huge design spaces and diversity of sensing structures.

While current affordable printing technologies like carbon black conductive PLA don’t support power transfer though conductive filament, On-PCB actuation can support this kind of thing.

How? Printegrated circuits are embedded during a mid-print pause into a designed cavity, just like when printing an embedded magnet, nut, or bit of fabric.

The heart of the printegrated circuits approach though is prinjection. Unlike traditional print pause print workflows, with Printegrated Circuits, we have to add custom movements to the print to create reliable connections between the Conductive materials and PCB. without this step traces do not adhere to the surface and good contact isn’t made.

The slicer post-processing script for this is on GitHub, but be warned it is experimental and ugly.