Bare Conductive - creativity with the popular Touch

Does crowdsourcing actually work?

The creative types at Bare Conductive would answer with a resounding "yes!". 

A couple of weeks ago they launched their latest project, an interactive prototyping platform called Touch Board. They hoped to raise pledges worth £15,000 on the creative fundraising website Kickstarter, to enable the London-based company the chance to put the board into production. Within a few days, however, their target had been reached. The money continued to flood in and at the time of writing they had raised over £60,000, with two weeks of the funding period still to run – giving Bare Conductive the opportunity to invest in other areas. 

What does their success prove? That the right product, marketed well, will always find willing investors.  It also shows that this small Spitalfields start-up, founded by four Royal College of Art graduates in 2010, have a knack for developing products with the popular touch. 

At the heart of all Bare Conductive products is the unique electric paint – a material which was born not in a lab, but online. None of Bare’s co-founders Matt Johnson, Isabel Lizardi, Bibi Nelson and Becky Pilditch are chemists by background and incredibly did much of their research and development on Wikipedia. It is all the more remarkable then that what they were able to create. 

A kind of user-friendly, heat-free solder, this ingenious substance can simply be drawn onto paper or card like liquid wire, creating simple circuits between components like batteries, resistors and LEDs.

Children, crafters and hobbyists with no soldering experience can use conductive paint to create 2 or 3-D projects with basic electronic effects. Bare have produced a range of kits catering mainly for the schools market, enabling kids to make flashing greetings cards or illuminated model houses.  

The key to the company’s success so far has been the versatility and extreme usability of conductive paint. The way it has been embraced by the design, engineering and artistic community, and played its part in countless projects, works and installations, can be seen on the Bare Conductive Community page. Some hobbyists and model railway enthusiasts even prefer it to solder. And it is the way the team are adapting the technology and taking it into different areas that is currently so exciting about Bare Conductive. 

So what will you be able to do with the Touch Board? What won’t you be able to do with it! 

The paint can be used as a sensor or a switch, linked to the board so that particular sounds or effects can be created whenever you touch the painted area. Simply by connecting a battery, a speaker and an SD card to the Arduino-compatible device, you could bring sounds to your children’s book, create audio in your art project, play instruments you have painted, draw a light switch or a security system. As with most Internet of Things projects, the only real limits are your own imagination. 

As Matt Johnson says: "Devices no longer have to look high tech to be high tech. Our goal is to put interactivity onto objects you don't expect."

A range of Bare Conductive products are are available at Rapid, including the seasonal Merry Resistivities kit.