3-D printing gets a lot of attention, but Inês Henriques believes 2-D printers have an important role to play in the future of the internet of things. She’s running a Kickstarter campaign for a new system called Printoo that makes flexible, modular, and impossibly thin electronic components available to the masses in an attempt to enable what she calls the “Internet of Print.”

The Lisbon, Portugal-based team behind the project is called Ynvisible and has designed and collected a series of paper-thin, printed electronic components—batteries, light sensors, solar cells, and 350 micron thick LEDs—that allow makers to fabricate complex electromechanical gadgets that could be slipped underneath a door.

What kind of gadgets? How about a beer koozie that shows an animated smiley face when your favorite team scores a goal. Or a cook book with a fully-functional digital timer printed on the recipe. Or a poster promoting a school’s student body president that can tabulate votes. These may seem silly, but the hope is to encourage a new mode of thinking not shaped by uncompromising PCBs and heavy plastic housings.

Adding a few traditional components to the Printoo toolkit helps demonstrate the true potential of the platform. Attaching rigid high-capacity lithium batteries, DC motors, and Bluetooth Low Energy circuit boards allows more advanced devices to be fabricated, including a blimp made with balloons scavenged from a birthday party and a 3-D printed RC car that has circuitry folded inside complex internal geometries.

An Overlooked Technology

Ynvisible’s core technology expertise is in the design and manufacture of electrochromic (EC) displays, a less expensive, lower-fidelity cousin to e-paper. It’s a relatively old technology that allows a material to change color with the application of electricity and is used in the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner to shade windows. Despite impressive high-altitude applications, the consumer electronics industry has largely overlooked electrochromics, and other printed electronics, in favor of more traditional solutions.

“The fact that the technology can be produced using the equipment found in practically every local print shop by printing layers of inks, makes it more suitable for embedding interactive visual functionalities to an amazingly wide range of applications,” says Henriques. “While other forms of e-paper are great for e-readers, Ynvisible’s tech is great for what we call ‘everyday objects,’ anywhere freedom of form factor, low-power and cost-efficiency is useful and needed.”

Unlike Apple and Samsung, most makers don’t have the ability to mint new circuit boards or have manufacturers lined up to create custom space-saving components. Instead, they bodge together Raspberry Pis, sensors, and battery packs that deliver cool functionality in an, albeit clunky, form. “What’s perhaps most exciting is the increasing design possibilities electrochromics offer, mainly due to the transparency and flexible form factor of the displays,” says Henriques. “We can break free from rectangular dedicated spaces and flat rigid surfaces for electronic displays.”

A Modular Kit for Experiments

The system is purposefully modular, will be open sourced, and utilizes standard 2.54mm connectors making it easy for a hardware hacker to integrate the pieces into an existing electronics workflow. These chunky components take away from system’s low-profile appeal, but are intended to be a gateway step in a project. “There was a trade-off there so Printoo will have some ‘chunkier’ pieces, but the idea is really to use it to test out first product concepts,” says Henriques. “Then makers can go on to make their second iteration of the prototype fully flexible without connectors.”

From a software perspective, the system is Arduino-compatible, has hooks that will allow easy integration with IFTTT events, and there will be smartphone apps to support various functions.

Printoo gives professionals a powerful new toolkit, but the papery nature of the technology makes it approachable for beginners. The boards can be cut with scissors and if a budding designer is scared of soldering irons, conductive paint pens can be used to draw circuits on the thin plastic substrate.

“We are set to develop electrochromics as the visual interface technology for the internet of things,” says Printoo creator Inês Henriques. Ynvisible

While useful, flexible EC displays and other 2-D electronics had been maddeningly difficult for makers to get ahold of. Ynvisible had a thriving business supplying high-volume consumer products companies with EC displays, but was getting inundated by makers who were looking for a kit or samples they could use in their designs. Other printed batteries and sensors were equally hard to come by, so Henriques and company sprang into action. “We believe that by getting these technologies out into the hands of a wider community of makers, there are huge opportunities for developing completely new types of products and services based on printed electronics,” says Henriques.

Whether paper thin electronics will spur a wave of startup activity is still to be seen, but Henriques has big plans for the often overlooked technology. “We are set to develop electrochromics as the visual interface technology for the internet of things,” she says. “We’ve already demonstrated what we call ‘physical like buttons’ and there are numerous other things in our web-browsers today that could be brought to our physical surroundings without having to use your smart phone or tablet for every internet interaction.”

Printoo’s Kickstarter, with kits ranging in price from $45-550 has already doubled its funding goal with over a week to go.