After nearly twelve months of development work and testing, Newbury Electronics has completed the manufacture and supply of the first 15,000 Touch Boards for Bare Conductive. This exciting new product allows anyone to engage with the endless possibilities of electronics in a fun and intuitive way and Newbury Electronics has played an integral role in bringing this innovative product to market.
Becky Pilditch, production manager at Bare Conductive said; “We knew from the start that the Touch Board offered a real opportunity to make the power of modern electronics available and exciting to a far wider audience. We also knew that, if at all possible, we wanted to use a UK manufacturer to partner us and help realise our ambition in bringing this idea to the market. Newbury Electronics has far exceeded our expectations and has worked tirelessly with us to overcome the inevitable hiccups that occur as a concept moves from the drawing board to the shop window.”
“PCBs are often hidden away inside the finished product and little thought is given to their aesthetics but with Touch Board the PCB is the finished product. It became apparent in early prototypes that there was a problem with clarity of text on the rear of the boards. Whilst the norm is to print black on to white solder resist this wasn’t going to work. We were able to use our extensive experience of printing high quality images and retooled the job using a two stage print process to solve the problem,” explained Philip King, MD at Newbury Electronics when asked about some of the challenges this project has involved. “We have also undertaken the final preparation of the boards for customer delivery on behalf Bare Conductive. It seemed to be more efficient and expedient for us to pack the PCBs, ready for retail, at the end of our production and quality checks rather than packing them for distribution to a third party who would then have to unwrap and repackage them ready for sale.”
“This is the largest single manufacturing run we have done and we have been able to achieve Bare Conductive’s demanding delivery requirements to meet their product launch schedule only because of the significant capital investment and successful appointments that we made this summer. It is also indicative of our desire to not just meet but to exceed the expectations of any client,” added Philip King.
The Touch Board allows you to change the world around you by turning almost any material or surface into a sensor. For example connect anything conductive to one of its 12 electrodes and trigger a sound via its onboard MP3 player, play a MIDI note or do anything else that you might do with an Arduino or Arduino-compatible device. It has been designed as an easy-to-use platform for a huge range of projects, whether it’s painting a lightswitch on your wall, making a paper piano or creating a custom interactive surface. The Touch Board is now available for pre-order from www.bareconductive.com where you can also see a video showing just a few of the ways to use this PCB.
Bare Conductive is a design and technology studio based in East London, UK. The company spun-out from a student project started at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, where the electric paint was first developed. After graduating in 2009 they set up a business and started selling the paint and a range of kits that demonstrate different ways to use this incredible material. From the beginning Bare Conductive has been passionate about developing accessible platforms for people to get creative with technology. From paint, to starter kits and now hardware, their goal is to make electronics fun and intuitive by blending design and technology.