3D printing has revolutionized rapid prototyping by speeding up the creation of custom-shaped objects. With the rise of multi-material 3Dprinters, these custom-shaped objects can now be made interactive in a single pass through passive conductive structures. However, connecting conventional electronics to these conductive structures often still requires time-consuming manual assembly involving many wires, soldering or gluing. To alleviate these shortcomings, we propose Oh, Snap!: a fabrication pipeline and interfacing concept to magnetically connect a 3D-printed object equipped with passive sensing structures to conventional sensing electronics. To this end, Oh, Snap! utilizes ferromagnetic and conductive 3D-printed structures, printable in a single pass on standard printers. We further present a proof-of-concept capacitive sensing board that enables easy and robust magnetic assembly to quickly create interactive 3D-printed objects. We evaluate Oh, Snap! by assessing the robustness and quality of the connection and demonstrate its broad applicability by a series of example applications.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445641
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)