RUBBERY CONDUCTIVE FUN! Build Waterproof, Wearable, Bouncy, Heatproof, Low-Resistance, Transparent, Indestructible circuits!

Plus it's real easy to do, and requires few exotic materials!

The goal here is to open up an amazing material, Silicone, that is becoming more and more accessible to the DIY community to the wonderful possibilities of electronics. DIY Conductive materials (conductive thread, paint, glue, fabric) have let craftspeople incorporate electronics in their project in uncountable fun ways. In the way that soft circuits let makers explore digital technology while utilizing the amazing properties of textiles, I think silicone circuits (silc circuits) have the potential to open another arena of physical-digital crafting in sculpture, wearables, prosthetics, toymaking, and special effects.

For those who want to get right to it, here's the basic recipe, and I'll go into lots more details about this in the later steps (including materials, suggestions, and project ideas). It's pretty simple, you just need the right materials, and the right process. With this method you can utilize many of the properties of high performance silicone, and create shapes and designs both thick and thin.

Basic Recipe

(Contributed to the Public Domain 2015)

Mix Chopped Carbon Fiber (under 6mm lengths) with a bit of rubbing alcohol (to break it up) Let mostly dry Whip together the Carbon Fibers with the Part A of the silicone

Add Part B, and mold it!





Example Projects Described

Rubber Breadboards

Anemone Touch Sensors

Rubber Finger Mold Styluses

Conductive Rubber Film

Cap-Touch Quiz Games

And MORE!





What's awesome about Silicone?

Silicone is an incredible (but sometimes frustrating material) with many amazing properties that highly compliment many problems with the way people usually do electronics with metal:

Waterproof: Your circuits can be inherently weatherproofed. Leave them in the jungle! Bring them into the ocean!

Durable: Can stand up to large impacts! Make toys for pets to toss and smash!

Flexible: Can be worn on the body, stretched, played with.

Translucent: Which lets you add colorings that respond to heat, light, or electricity to change colors or glow!

Body-Safe: Silicone is pretty inert and non-toxic. It's like rubbery glass. There's a reason they use it for food trays and sex toys. Also no horrid fumes when you mix it! You can mix it in your weird basement!

Mold-Able: Unlimited shapes and sizes and textures. That's why the best movie props and halloween masks are made from it

Grippy: You can stab things into it (like wires!) and they will stick, and be held in place!

Insulative: Stops electrical shorts (unless of course you make it conductive!)

Previous Works

This is not a new idea, but it's one that has been generally only possible in big industrial processes. It has been quite difficult to figure out a formula that works for the DIY enthusiast who also doesn't want to work with my gross, potentially toxic chemicals. Folks have been trying to figure out how to make conductive silicone yourself in the DIY community for a long time with some success. The amazing instructables user mikey77, for instance, has the standard instructable for conductive rubber.

Most DIY techniques, however rely on incorporating graphite powder into the silicone which has many drawbacks. Examples of such drawbacks to these methods include: making the rubber brittle (falls apart, not rubbery), messy (leaves black stuff on you), high impedance (500kohms++), and being limited to tin cure silicones (e.g. GE silicone 1 which is not as easy to make thick objects, not as stretchy and not food and body safe). The tin cure silicones also prevent platinum cure silicones from curing, so you cannot incorporate this into bigger silicone projects. I have spent 2 years working with the fantastic open-source sex toy company Comingle (www.comingle.io), looking through many papers and projects with some limited details about various different techniques for doing this, but when implementing them, they have all come up short in do-ability or performance.

I owe many thanks to the incredible engineer Craig Durkin, for helping me with this project!

This new type of carbon fiber silicone (which sounds cool) solves a lot of these problems!

Advantages of Carbon Fiber Conductive Silicone

I ran across the idea of using carbon fibers in an old (thankfully) expired patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US3680027A/en?q=... They add 5% carbon fibers to a mix to increase the conductivity of already conductive silicone, but it works great just on its own!

This style of making your own conductive silicone has lots of advantages compared to other techniques I have seen including: