January 30, 2014

Experimenting with flexible displays

Over the last few months several manufacturers have announced consumer devices with curved or flexible displays, which look to change the landscape of consumer electronics in an interesting way. With this type of display in mind, Marin Davide was inspired to experiment with making their own display, but on a much simpler level.

Although Marin's example is only a numeric display, the concepts and methods used can be reproduced to create some interesting displays. Their example uses sheet material printed with thermochromic liquid crystal ink, which changes colour (bright blue) when heated above 27 degrees Celsius. Attached to this is nickel-chrome wire segments that form display segments - when current flows they will heat up and cause the sheet material to change colour. This is demonstrated in the following video:

An Arduino is used to control the current to each segment in the display via Darlington transistors, due to the high current requirements. To learn more and download design instructions, visit the project page. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

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