This exciting research collaboration between a Digital Arts lecturer and an Electrical Engineering postgraduate aims to prototype an affordable circuit board for African arts and design practitioners to use in the creation of interactive electronic devices. Tegan Bristow, lecturer in Interactive Media in Digital Arts and Dino Fizzotti, an MSc student in Electronics Research group of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering will be conducting an experiment together with Jill Ross from David Krut Print Workshop. Starting on the 26 September, the team aim to establish that a low-cost circuit board can be produced using the technologies available in the Fine Arts print studio at the Wits School of Arts.
The circuit board is based on the Arduino design; an open source hardware platform developed by a team of engineers, artists and designers led by the Italian Massimo Banzi in 2005. The board is designed for the easy creation of sensor based interactive installations, objects and environmental interventions. Since the board was developed for artists and designers, it means that it is easy to use and requires very little knowledge of electronics and sensors. There are also extensive libraries of tutorials and examples available for users at no cost on the Internet. This research aims to find ways for African arts and design practitioners to easily and cheaply access a local version of the circuit board for use in the development of design and artworks.
The process will involve using a laser printer to print the circuit image onto glossy magazine paper. This image is then transferred onto a single-sided copper board using a hot clothes iron. The board is then cut to size using a paper guillotine before using an etching process to inscribe the circuits onto the board. Fizzotti estimates that it should be possible to produce a a single board for R112. At this cost, the local board will be significantly cheaper than the Arduino boards currently imported from Italy.
