We think printed electronics allows for three key features in new products:
- Freedom in design. It used to be that electronics was about designing square rigid boards to put inside square rigid boards. That doesn't have to be the case anymore.
- Low-power applications. Printed components tend to be very low power (electrochromic displays) or to provide that little bit of power while still being flexible and printed (printed OPV, printed batteries);
- Cost feasibility in high volume. These technologies, taking advantage of printing processes already available in the printing industry, can reach price points feasible for a lot of applications where traditional electronics are not.
Lets say you have an idea to make intelligent boarding passes for airports. With Printoo, you can make a prototype using electrochromic displays to tell you how long you have before boarding and/or how far away you are from your gate. You can have printed batteries powering the system. You can have Bluetooth for positioning and synch with the servers. It's not going to look exactly like a boarding pass, but it'll be a much closer approximation than would be possible with any other proto board and it will use technologies that would make sense for that. You would most likely be able to make and code a mock intelligent boarding pass, looking reasonably good, in under an hour.
At a second stage then you could design a custom board integrating these technologies and have concept prototype that would be much closer to a true boarding pass. We want to also help people have access to the right tools for this stage.
We thought that the current existing prototyping kits didn't offer the right form-factors to prototype product concepts for things like smart wearables and the high-volume internet of things (where intelligence is added to stickers, labels, packages, and so on).
