An Idaho-based company called Rohinni has a question for you: what if light was printable? It’s an odd question, for sure, and one that was purely hypothetical until recently. Rohinni has created a paper-thin LED light source that needs nothing more than an electrical current to light up. Appropriately, they have named it Lightpaper.

Current LED lighting requires soldering LEDs to circuit boards, a process which is expensive and time-consuming as evidenced by the relatively high cost of LED home lighting. Rohinni’s method is simple, cheap, quick, and can be produced in large quantities.

It works by mixing tiny LEDs – each no bigger than a red blood cell – with ink. The illuminating ink is then printed onto a substance that conducts electricity. The process is clever, but not yet perfected. Currently, the LEDs aren’t distributed evenly over the entire printing surface, which can create a type of “twinkling” effect. But the company says that their forthcoming second version of Lightpaper will not have this flaw.

With its low cost and an expected lifespan of 20 years, Lightpaper is on track to displace OLEDs as the future of flexible lighting. Rohinni’s ideas for potential applications are plentiful, including lighted wallpaper for hotels, glowing logos on just about anything, and even car headlights. They are working with several companies to put the cool paper-thin lighting to work, and they expect the first round of products and objects with integrated Lightpaper to go public sometime in 2015.

The post Everything is Illuminated: Paper-Thin Printed LED Lighting first appeared on Gajitz.

The flexible display is a technology that’s really started to come into its own in the past several years, and printed electronics are keeping pace. The two naturally complement each other, and PrintScreen, a customizable thin-film touch display, is among the latest and most promising combinations. It is a digital fabrication of a super-thin flexible touch screen that allows even unskilled people to print custom flexible displays.

PrintScreen is the result of a collaboration between Simon Olberding, Michael Wessley, and Jürgen Steimle. The team chose to use electroluminescent phosphoric ink, a material that requires very little power to use and boasts a long life. It’s resilient to bending and manipulation, making it ideal for flexible displays.

The process starts with creating an image in any vector graphics program. The displays are fabricated using four layers printed on top of each other: a silver conductor, the dielectric (an electrical insulator that can be polarized when an electric field is applied), the phosphor (the aforementioned electroluminescent ink), and a translucent conductor. This process is normally carried out by screen printing.

The display can then be printed on a substrate. Because of the unique qualities of the flexible displays, there are very few limits in the type of substrate used, provided it is smooth. The displays can be printed onto paper, ceramic, leather, wood, plastic, and many more. They can also easily be made into touch sensors without the need for an additional overlay.

The team behind PrintScreen also came up with a method of instantly printing the displays with an inkjet printer. It would use paper that has already been prepared with all of the printed layers except for the ink. A normal inkjet printer is loaded with the electroluminescent ink and prints the design right onto the prepared display for an instant customized object.

The post PrintScreen: Lightweight, Flexible, Printable Displays first appeared on Gajitz.