MechCircuit

What it does

MechCircuit is an innovative prototype design and manufacturing platform. It combines circuit design, structural design, and modeling design using a new type of conductive magnet.

Your inspiration

For designers, they often lack professional knowledge in circuits and structures, which makes them lack technical means when implementing their creative ideas. MechCircuit, as a design and manufacturing platform, can help them conveniently design in terms of appearance, electronics, and structure. For the product development process, the design of appearance, circuits, and structures are often carried out separately, which ultimately makes it difficult to match between the different parts. This wastes a lot of time and money. The vision of MechCircuit is to complete the entire process together to improve the efficiency of product iteration.

How it works

1. By using a conductive magnet and integrating it into the circuit, traditional static circuits can be made to move. This approach can create some movable structures and easily change the layout of the circuit. It can be widely used in interactive device design, rapid prototype manufacturing, and product development in the future. 2. Developed software tools that can quickly create circuits and magnet structures. Designers, artists, and researchers without a background in circuits and mechanics can quickly get started with design and manufacturing, with a very low learning cost. This can support these groups to freely exercise their imagination to create. 3. By integrating circuit design, structural design, and modeling design together, products can be considered as a whole, which can greatly reduce research and development costs and time.

Design process

Laser cutting revolutionizes the creation of personal-fabricated prototypes. These objects can have transformable properties by adopting diferent materials and be interactive by integrating elec-tronic circuits. However, circuits in laser-cut objects always have limited movements, which refrains laser cutting from achieving interactive prototypes with more complex movable functions like mechanisms. We propose MechCircuit, a design and fabrication pipeline for making mechanical-electronical objects with laser cut-ting. We leverage the neodymium magnet’s natures of magnetism and conductivity to integrate electronics and mechanical struc-ture joints into prototypes. We conduct the evaluation to explore technological parameters and assess the practical feasibility of the fabrication pipeline. And we organized a user-observing workshop for non-expert users. Through the outcoming prototypes, the re-sult demonstrates the feasibility of MechCircuit as a useful and inspiring prototyping method.

How it is different

MechCircuit represents a brand new approach to prototype development. Compared to traditional methods, it integrates the design of circuits, structures, and forms into one. This greatly improves efficiency during the design and iteration processes and has created a completely new way of interaction.

Future plans

As a fundamental manufacturing method, MechCircuit can be widely applied in various different fields, such as scientific research, art, and education. We will actively explore different possibilities. In addition, we are also committed to promoting this method in various manufacturing methods to improve its universality.

Awards

1. reddot award 2023: design concept 2. dutch design week 2023 3. A design award 2023: silver prize 4. Paper: In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 735, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581002