3D Printing Wireless, Connected Household Objects

University of Washington  researchers have developed a way to 3D print plastic objects and sensors capable of communicating wirelessly with other smart devices, without the need for batteries or other electronics. They have 3D printed eyeglass frames, armbands, and artistic models with embedded magnetic data. They also propose 3D printed application prototypes including buttons, smart sliders, and physical knobs that wirelessly control music volume and lights as well as smart bottles that can sense liquid flow and send data to nearby RF devices.

Transcript

00:00:00 in this project we asked if objects made of plastic materials can be connected to the internet without batteries in electronics imagine if you could attach a 3d printed sensor to your tied bottle that detects when detergent is running low and automatically orders refills with your smartphone our technique printed Wi-Fi allows 3d printed plastic objects to

00:00:26 send data wirelessly to any Wi-Fi receiver like a smartphone using ambient Wi-Fi from any Wi-Fi router our 3d printed devices either absorb or reflect Wi-Fi signals to convey a 0 or a 1 and the core of our design is a switch which is attached to a spring a plastic gear presses against the spring which makes contact with the 3d printed antenna made of conductive filament when the switch

00:00:54 makes contact with the antenna the signal transition is quickly in amplitude we create an anemometer to measure wind speed here receive the raw time domain signal note the transitions is thick tt rotates we also create a flow meter to measure water speed reconstruct input widgets including a button knob and slider with these

00:01:40 techniques we enable a rich ecosystem of talking objects