Update: thank you everyone for your comments in the Hack a Day post!

In these days I am in Rome, for the european edition of the Maker Faire, because a project I contributed to (MusicInk), got selected.

Now is the night of the first day of the faire, reserved only to schools, and although I am exhausted, I got a very nice moment at the faire so I am writing this post in an attempt to crystalize it and share it.

MusicInk’s booth is in front of Tecnificio, near Bare Conductive (we use their product for our drawings) and near How.Do.

After a while, seeing the guys of Tecnificio using their portable press and their 3D printer, and remembering a recent Instructables about printing circuits using lithography, an idea stroke my mind: why not 3D print a stamp of a PCB and use the conductive paint to print circuits? After that, applying SMD components on it.

At least I could avoid to be careful applying the mask of the lithography method.

I told my idea to Alessandro Contini, who is at the faire for How.Do, and he likes it so much that he told it to the guys of the TechLab, the Fablab of Chieri, at the faire as well.

They suggested me to laser cut the stamp directly and they immediately cutted out a little wood stamp of a famous and simple PCB.

Then Tecnificio very kindly helped me to get an idea of how an actual stamp could come out, using their press.

At the end of the day I could not resist and I roughly applied the conductive ink on the stamp and tried it out.

Here is the result:

**Is this a success?

No, as you can clearly see.

But I just wanted to understand if my idea was feasible and I think it is, thanks to these promising results.

But more important than the idea itself, is making it right and <a href=”http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4747682/apple-tim-cook-jony-ive-craig-federighi-interview-bloomberg” title=""New? New is easy. Right is hard."" target=“_blank”>making things right is not easy.

I think lots of works are still needed to get the stamp right and, eventually, the ink right.

So what is the point?

The thing is that I am amazed by how fast an idea got a very early prototype, less than 30 minutes, fueled and inspired by the talent and the passion (and the patience) of the people of the Maker Faire.

This little moment let me feel and understood the very sense of the Maker Faire.

That’s all folks!

🙂

(By the way, I would love to wear a shirt with a synth printed on it and I would really love a set of mini stamps with the breakout of ICs and other components, to easily stamp out circuits…)

Update (19 October 2013): here is a successful test by Alessandro Contini!