With a simple piece of paper, engineers create self-powered, wireless keyboard | Hacker News Reader

With a simple piece of paper, engineers create self-powered, wireless keyboard

smithsonianmag.com

137 pointsbased263 comments

From the article :"So, the next time you’re about to crumple up a piece of paper and pitch it into the trashcan, you might want to think twice. You could very well be tossing out an important piece of technology"

Why do reporters still persist with these silly signoffs, that are actually wrong. ( They do it on the evening news as well as these pop science things). The paper you throw in the bin today is actually of no further use to anyone. Just like the glass of water you are drinking isn't going to be used to make hydrogen gas for a car, nor sandcastle you just built for silicon in the latest integrated circuit.

I believe it is called "humour"

Doesn't that involve funny things?

Only if you're knowledgable in the field of the joke.

Hahaha

It would be nice if journalists were better at it.

It would be even nicer if they were better at reporting facts.

Journalists are great at reporting facts but it seems management doesn’t like them.

Have you been interviewed once? And also read what they finally wrote? Nope, sorry, they are not particularily great at reporting facts. All they do is fill a page with text.

You know now that you mention it I think you might be right.

What is the equation for this again?

Pi.Z.Z=A

For a circular area of Humor with radius Z. Best served fresh.

Humor crafted for the demographic that still subscribe to magazines.

People read news for entertainment, not education, and that's what journalists are selected, trained, and optimized for.

Most articles can be summed up in 3 or less factual sentences but nobody would read that.

> The paper you throw in the bin today is actually of no further use to anyone.

I believe the journalist is actually making a damning, albeit poorly introduced, argument against the device as confronted to cultural expectations.

If these keyboards become widespread, it could become easy to mistakenly bin them, because “it is just paper” and it is not obvious that there is a potentially expensive coating and invisible circuit printed on it.

It is a similar argument to the one made against Bitcoin, in which it is all too easy to lose access to money because we hold a cultural habit to discard old hard drives – but now suddenly, they are also wallets containing potentially large sums.

You say that, but "just" paper is actually becoming pretty rare nowadays in a lot of households and offices.

Well technically, given enough time and a suitable pathway through the water cycle, the water you drink today could likely end up in a Hydrogen fuel cell. Or end up on Mars for all we know.

Cannot believe I am saying this, but please do not export freshwater to Mars.

I’m now imagining the colonization of Mars happening by sending dehydrated humans and just adding water when they get there.

Water from Fiji is shipped all around the globe just because it says it's from Fiji. If humans ever get around to colonizing Mars, you can bet someone will be selling $50000 bottles of pure nectar bottled at the Hudson River.

On the other hand, we'd also be shipping water from Mars to earth. Get yer bottle of Red2o for $50000 shipped to earth.

Thanks to hyperinflation, that's a reasonable price.

I feel like it's a device to leave an impression on the reader/viewer that doesn't make them feel dumb if they didn't fully understand how it works

The lack of details is infuriating. It makes it sound like they implemented a compliant bluetooth chip at 1/1000th the cost size and power of commercial solutions.

from skimming the paper, the big advance here is a moisture/oil resistant "triboelectric nanogenerator", which generates energy from touch or vibration, and they could get stable power out of it long enough to do a bluetooth transmission with a standard (conventional) bluetooth chip (an adafruit bluefruit, apparently)

the moisture/oil resistant part is a big deal for actually using it in the real world

The actual paper [0] does have some decent details, though it is somewhat heavy.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.105301

Too bad they published it through Elsevier. I would have liked to read their paper.

That's what sci-hub.tw is for.

Doesn't appear to be there yet. See https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.105301.

A simple piece of paper... With circuits printed on it. Kinda neat tech, totally clickbait title.

I was expecting different click-bait, like a keyboard drawn on paper with a camera pointed at it or something.

Me too, and probably possible as hack that any decent developer can do right now.

In fact when camera enabled glasses looked like they were going to be a thing that was the very thing I imagined taking off. You grab a piece of paper and haphazardly draw a bunch of keys on it and your glasses with a little AI do the rest

How about a laser-projection bluetooth keyboard?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKdtAePxy8

They've been available for a few years now.

Fun fact: they've been available for over a decade at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes back a few years more than this 2008 article. Never personally used one, though.

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/geeky-gadgets-the-bluetooth-la...

Ain't great. You can only type certain keys at a time since the beam-break for j prevents a follow-up n in the denounce period. I only get about 30wpm... Disregarding feedback.

It could probably be done now just by looking at hand shapes and if you’re a touch typist you might not even need the projection, just a dot or two (which could just be stickers on a surface) to orientate your hands over nothing.

Hand shapes for typing are far from standardized or recognisable. Nowhere near the accuracy a laser beam break gives you. (The projection LED is separate from the detection laser, which is much lower power)

Well, to be honest, the ability to print useful circuits onto ordinary paper and have a working electronic thing made of said paper in minutes is pretty cool...

I had imagined they had built it by carefully folding the paper to give each "key" a distinctive sound that a nearby computer could decode into key presses

Were you expecting magic?

I went in expecting some sort of clickbait (since, y'know, paper isn't exactly known for its electrical properties), but I'd assumed that when they said "[w]ith a simple piece of paper" they really meant a piece of paper. I expected it to be "with just a simple piece of paper an a $14k sound analysis / SDR / magnetism detection rig, we can detect force on the paper", which is still clickbait but would've at least struck me as interesting/novel, as opposed to "we layered actual electronics on paper", which could be interesting if they're pioneering flexible electronics or something but makes the paper basically irrelevant.

> with just a simple piece of paper an a $14k sound analysis / SDR / magnetism detection rig, we can detect force on the paper

This is actually better than that. They created a spray on invisible circuit board that can both detect touch inputs and generate enough electricity to power a bluetooth radio. They achieved all this for a unit cost of 25 cents. That's a pretty amazing achievement and opens up some quite practical uses.

Imagine something like Nintendo Labo, but with so many more opportunities for interactivity.

Another idea, imagine a student's notebook that synchronized their writing with their phone.

Imagine if this were not a piece of paper, but a mechanical keyboard where the clicky action of the keys generates enough energy for the self powered wirelessness!

That exists... sort of: https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-tap-switch/046677473...

That would be excellent. I’m very impressed they managed to make this friction powered - doing some with a mechanical keyboard should be somewhat easier? Sounds like a fun project but somewhat beyond my ability.

That's actually quite an interesting idea. I would imagine that it wouldn't be any harder to implement then the paper in the article.

Can anyone ELI5 this for me ? I am unable to access the paper and the abstract is way too technical for me to make sense. If I understand this right, they are using friction to generate power, but how are they doing Bluetooth wireless transmission ? Is the bluetooth circuit and antenna also printed on the paper ?

I worked on a project with Novalia a few years back, they have a simple way of explaining their tech: https://www.novalia.co.uk/platforms/

We needed a small battery coin for some unique interactions, not sure if that was needed, & not sure/didnt read what Purdue is doing different with self-power.

They did that with a "simple" piece of paper? Imagine what they could do with a "complex" piece of paper!

More seriously, we've seen attempts to make flat keyboards [0]. The lack of haptic feedback limits them to niche devices. If they can do more than just input devices though, I'd be much more interested.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/AGS-Wireless-Projection-Bluetooth-Sma...

Would you consider soft keyboard implementations in modern smartphones as niche applications?

Soft keyboards have haptic feedback. But that aside, they also have a bunch of accommodations to make up for their inferiority. Dynamically-sized keys, automatic typo correction, Swype.

This project is not a replacement for phone keyboards, and if it was then I would still consider it inferior to physical keyboard in the same way that touch keyboards are inferior to them. Phone keyboard require a lot of hacks to make them more acceptable, from providing haptic feed with vibration to inferring the letter desired through proximity, which it often gets wrong for people with larger fingers.

None of which matters though, because that isn't the use case on display here. The use shown is extremely similar to the projected keyboard to which I linked, which has remained a niche application.

So, my point stands: A use-case other than inferior versions of input devices is needed to demonstrate the value of this innovation. It is an interesting innovation, and my inability to immediately think of commercially viable applications for it doesn't change that. It's great that we come up with novel advances like this, and have them in our massive tool chest to pull them out once we connect the technology to a practical application. All I'm saying here is that, as presented, we don't have that connection to a practical application.

The Q+A section of that product is like some kind of reddit comment chain.

This has a certain “Diamond Age” vibe to it. I’m all for single-function devices as individual pieces of “smart” paper.

Add a smart ink layer to this and you do have the beginnings of an Illustrated Primer.

Precisely. ;)

I remember reading about highly fluoronated compounds that are both oil-phobic and hydrophobic being an looming ecological disaster because they last practically forever. Supposedly they were (still are?) used in pizza boxes.

Ah yes, aspoly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, now banned by the FDA. Not sure if that's what they used here, but it sounds similar.

From the headline I thought it was related to a video I saw years ago for a television remote control from a French (I think) hardware engineer. It was only a prototype but it replaced the batteries with a piezoelectric mechanism that generated enough of a charge from physically depressing the button to send the infrared signal. Probably not enough power there to reliably send a bluetooth signal though.

There are wireless (rf)light switches that use that mechanism so as to not need batteries.

Maybe "spell books" in ancient "history" were just interfaces for the time travelers.

Scott Meyer's "Magic 2.0" series is more or less this idea.

The magic factor is too strong and in a bad way. It seems to defy fundamental constraints of physics.

Am I expected to believe that friction caused by pressing your finger on paper can supply enough power to make a successful bluetooth transmission?

Short on details from the article, but if there is a way to make the keyboards thinner, I have no doubt Apple will be on it.

Maybe with three pieces of paper there will be enuogh room to feel the "travel" and feedback?

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