By making a pattern of laser cuts in a flat piece of wood, you can easily create hinges, clamps, and other features. We made wooden booklets, each with a hinge and a notepad holder. The hinge can be fully bent in both directions repeatedly without breaking. How is that possible? First, wood has the strength to withstand repetitive bending and twisting. It won’t break as long as the stresses stay under a certain limit.
The trick to making the wood flexible is to break it up in a lot of small pieces that can all twist a little. All these tiny twists add up so you can bend the sheet without stressing the material too much.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Perfect timing as Apple patents “sninges”. I think this could get really interesting as this idea has been publicly displayed/disclosed for years.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/08/will-it-bend-newly-granted-apple-patent-shows-off-seamless-flexible-hinge/