Integrated electronics can assemble complex, functional devices
MIT researchers developed platform that utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices
MIT report:
These lightweight three-dimensional lattice building blocks, known as voxels, have high strength and stiffness, along with integrated sensing, response, and processing abilities that enable users without mechanical or electrical engineering expertise to rapidly produce interactive electronic devices.
The voxels, which can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured almost infinitely into various forms, cost about 50 cents each.
The prototyping platform, called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit), includes a user-friendly design tool that enables end-to-end prototyping, allowing a user to simulate the structure’s response to mechanical loads and iterate on the design as needed.
Rather than building electronics into a structure, the electronics become the structure
“This is about democratizing access to functional interactive devices. With VIK, there is no 3D printing or laser cutting required. If you just have the voxel faces, you are able to produce these interactive structures anywhere you want,” says Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and affiliate of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and the MIT Media Lab, and co-lead author of a paper on VIK.
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