Makers

Paper-Based E-Cello built with Zool for their Violonist Anne-Sophie G. -- Bourse Déclic Jeune Fondation de France 2006

Makers from a variety of schools and universities or other research labs, and of course from fablabs have contributed world-wide to explore the potential of paper-based and other sustainable electronics materials since 2006.
Building Sensors for Digital Music Instruments was the lead for our first paper-based electronics applications, as for insance with this Wood and Paper-Based E-Cello built with Zool for their Violonist Anne-Sophie and thanks to a.Bourse Déclic Jeune Grant from the Fondation de France in 2006.

Makers like the potential to design their sensors exactly lie they wanted using easy to process and affordable materials, such as those provided in our development Kits, and they always come up with new applications ideas.

Of course, these takes to have minimal knowledge in sciences and techlologies to understands the basics of electronics and computing.
You can check if you are up to date with this through our EDU page. And don't worry about difficulties, you can find simple applications that are accessible even by 7 year-old kids for the most enthousiastic among them.

So are you a maker?

If so, here is a list of tools and tutorials to best use our development kits for a variety of applications. You may need a development board such as an Arduino as well as other electronic wiring components

- Build, Plug, and Play a Force Sensor
- Build Plug and PLay a Flexion Sensor
- Build, Plug and Play a Position sensor

Test your productions

An Ohmmeter will help to produce and specify your sensors

New productions and prototyping can only be successful if you constantly test your materials, design and productions using appropriate tools and depending on your objectives.

Learn here how to quickly test you productions with a battery and a led but also more interestingly how to test them with a multimeter and how to use microcontroller to acquire related signals.

Circuit Test

When building resistors wand small circuit components with Papier Logik resources, a power source and a led may be enough to test shortcut and relative voltage outputs when resistance values are not too high (below the kOhms order).

This can already lead to a lot of fun and educational applications with little resources but when developing higher levels components such as more complex circuits or sensors, an Ohmmeter or equivalent digital tools should become you friends sooner or later. Here is a collection of good practices and useful information related to securely buildng, testing and specifying you sensors.

Testing with an Ohmmeter

A multimeter is the best tool for detecting shortcuts and measuring conductive materials and resistive sensors. Set as an ohmmeter,

Be aware that you will not read the same value for a component if you test it on the side or if you test it inside a powered circuit.

Testing with an Arduino

An Arduino is the best way to test and use resistive-based sensors, but also to build low-cost oscilloscopes to test materials and used them to build components.

With sufficient output range (e.g. 1k to 100kOms) a Voltage divider makes a simple electronic circuit to plug a resisitve-based sensors. but other techniques can also be of interest.

Then a development with a micro-controller that can be plugged to a computer or another peripheral like an arduino is a great start for building you first Human Interface Device with a variety of applications and efficiency.