The humble circuit board; green, rectangular and used to power the myriad gadgets we rely on in daily life.
From televisions to trains to toasters, most devices would be useless without the processors and connectors housed on printed circuit boards (PCBs). Unsurprisingly, the manufacturing of these boards is big business; the market was worth $62.3bn in 2013, and that figure is expected to rise to $74.3bn by 2018, with 32bn units being manufactured each year.
Traditionally PCBs do their best work out of sight, housed inside plastic casing or hidden behind a manufacturers’ logo. But now products are hitting the market that incorporate circuitry as part of the design.
Warwick Evans has created Printed Light, lamps which are formed from an aluminium printed circuit board (MPCB).
He said: “I’m a product development consultant, and work with companies to design and launch new products. I decided I wanted to launch my own product, and approached Chris Cowdery, an electronics designer to join the project. He suggested doing something with MPCB.
“The aluminium acts as a heat sink for the LED and can be formed into a rigid, three-dimensional form, so there’s no need for expensive and energy-hungry plastic moulded housings.
“We decided to make a visual feature out of this technology by showing and describing the functions of the tracks and components.”
Evans, of Elmdon, near Saffron Walden, is launching a Kickstarter campaign on November 1, which he hopes will raise the £25,000 needed to take Printed Light into production.
“The thing with circuit boards is that usually engineers think in one box and designers think in another one entirely,” he said. “I don’t think anybody has ever thought of bringing the two together in this way.”
Another man bringing beauty and functionality together is Saar Drimer. His firm, Boldport, design and manufacture working PCBs in many different shapes and colours.
“The idea was to create circuit boards that are functional, but could also be hung on the wall like a piece of art,” said Drimer, who has a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University and has lived in the city for the last nine years.
“It started out from the doodles which I did in my notebooks – as a computer scientist, these often incorporated circuit boards. I wanted to try and combine my interests and, as there was no software on the market which could do what I wanted, I created a programme myself.”
Drimer wrote PCBmodE, which allows circuit boards to be designed in any shape or size. Through Boldport, he builds custom products such as the Nutclough commemorative board, an audio amplifier produced for Calrec Audio’s 50th anniversary.
“If you want to attract people to your product today it’s not enough to have a square, green, board – you need another dimension and I think we can provide that,” he said. “Form and function can come together.”
SOLIDWORKS can bring form and function to your design – get in touch to find out more.
For more information on printed light visit www.printed-light.com
