FiberWire

Abstract

3D printing offers significant potential in creating highly customized interactive and functional objects. However, at present ability to manufacture functional objects is limited by available materials (e.g., various polymers) and their process properties. For instance, many functional objects need stronger materials which may be satisfied with metal printers. However, to create wholly interactive devices, we need both conductors and insulators to create wiring, and electronic components to complete circuits. Unfortunately, the single material nature of metal printing, and its inherent Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACMmust be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300797 high temperatures, preclude this. Thus, in 3D printed devices, we have had a choice of strong materials, or embedded interactivity, but not both. In this paper, we introduce a set of techniques we call FiberWire, which leverages a new commercially available capability to 3D print carbon fiber composite objects. Our technique demonstrates a means to embed circuitry for interactive devices within objects that are light weight and mechanically strong. With FiberWire, we describe a fabrication pipeline takes advantage of laser etching and fiber printing between layers of carbon-fiber composite to form low resistance conductors, thereby enabling the fabrication of electronics directly embedded into mechanically strong objects. Utilizing the fabrication pipeline, we show a range of sensor designs, their performance characterization on these new materials and finally three fully printed example object that are both interactive and mechanically strong ś a bicycle handle bar with interactive controls, a swing and impact sensing golf club and an interactive game controller (Figure 1). CHI 2019 Paper CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK