One can 3D print with conductive filament, and therefore plausibly create passive components like resistors. But what about active components, which typically require semiconductors? Researchers at…
So this is a 3D printed PTC thermistor. Very cool and potentially extremely useful for measuring temperatures within a housing which has never before been able to be done to my knowledge. This is potentially awesome for embedding in medical devices which by regulations cannot be above a specific temperature while in contact with the body.
That said, there is nothing “active” about it. Thermistors are, by definition, passive electronic components. Actives amplify, rectify, or supply electric energy while passives consume, store, and release supplied energy.
Couldn’t you build an amplifier by using a thin wire that heats up a larger wire? If you size the large wire to minimize self heating, then a small current would cause the thin wire to act as a heater, switching the large current.
Well yeah, you could do that with any PTC + resistor. That is then a circuit, not an active component. Also you would likely have to use more energy than you would gain from “amplifying” since the heat would conduct away from the target and radiate away.
For example, if you had a photoresistor and used an LED to turn its resistance from high to low, that doesn’t make the photoresistor an active component.
Plus in the paper, the small wire + geometry is a prerequisite to do the resistance switch without melting everything.
They did do the thing that HewlettHackard is describing. Check out the AND gate in the linked article. The input paths are short and use small wires, but also cross the larger paths that normally link the output to ground. If both are active, the paths to ground are interrupted, and the resistor to VCC pulls up the output. So they did make logic gates. In the paper they also demonstrate NOT and OR.
I gather there’s a technical sense of “active” that’s used in electrical engineering that might not apply here, but to someone like me, with only a tinkerer’s knowledge of components, logic gates seem like enough to justify the term in the headline.
So this is a 3D printed PTC thermistor. Very cool and potentially extremely useful for measuring temperatures within a housing which has never before been able to be done to my knowledge. This is potentially awesome for embedding in medical devices which by regulations cannot be above a specific temperature while in contact with the body.
That said, there is nothing “active” about it. Thermistors are, by definition, passive electronic components. Actives amplify, rectify, or supply electric energy while passives consume, store, and release supplied energy.
Couldn’t you build an amplifier by using a thin wire that heats up a larger wire? If you size the large wire to minimize self heating, then a small current would cause the thin wire to act as a heater, switching the large current.
Well yeah, you could do that with any PTC + resistor. That is then a circuit, not an active component. Also you would likely have to use more energy than you would gain from “amplifying” since the heat would conduct away from the target and radiate away.
For example, if you had a photoresistor and used an LED to turn its resistance from high to low, that doesn’t make the photoresistor an active component.
Plus in the paper, the small wire + geometry is a prerequisite to do the resistance switch without melting everything.
They did do the thing that HewlettHackard is describing. Check out the AND gate in the linked article. The input paths are short and use small wires, but also cross the larger paths that normally link the output to ground. If both are active, the paths to ground are interrupted, and the resistor to VCC pulls up the output. So they did make logic gates. In the paper they also demonstrate NOT and OR.
I gather there’s a technical sense of “active” that’s used in electrical engineering that might not apply here, but to someone like me, with only a tinkerer’s knowledge of components, logic gates seem like enough to justify the term in the headline.