Conductive spray paint?

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

All,

Here is an insane question. You've all probably seen conductive paint out there, like BarePaint, where paint/glue is mixed with graphite and used to sketch out a conductive track on paper, wood, drywall, etc. Here's my question - would a spray/aerosol version of the same stuff work?

A quick google of 'conductive spray paint' brought up this conductive nickle coating spray paint, used to coat the inside of electronics to prevent RFI interference:

If I had, say, a couple of batteries, buttons, and an LED stuck onto a piece of wood, would I be able to use this (or something like it) to paint a conductive track between them (presuming I'm using a mask to keep it neat)?

Thanks!
Matt

2

Probably not, too iffy (if that's a word) of a resistance would be my guess.

Stick with DIY PCBs.

3

You can probably power an LED. You may have fairly high resistance and you'll have to figure-out how to connect to it. Probably a lug around a screw with a fairly large contact area would give you enough contact.

For any significant power/current, or where you need consistent results, it's probably not the best solution.

I have a plastic housing here at work with a conductive coating on it. What I have is copper colored, so I assume it's copper based. Touching the leads from the Ohmmeter I'm getting readings that jump around between about 2 Ohms and about 10 Ohms. I think I'm mostly measuring resistance between the probes and the conductive surface because longer distances don't change the readings very much.

4

I have a can of zinc spray in the garage. It should be more than 90% zinc.

5

I'd imagine you might get away with it for low-power circuitry such as discrete CMOS
logic, but the weak point is the resistance in the power and ground lines - if you can
wire those properly then paint might be able to handle all the signal paths, since a few 100
ohms isn't an issue there.

6

Thanks for all the input guys! Peter_n - I found some out that 90-95% zinc spray online for pretty cheap. You think that would work?

The common thread I'm hearing is that it might work if the power I'm pushing through isn't too much. I'll be powering everything from the 5V pin on an ATMega328, which will be getting its input power from two CR2032 batteries connected in serial. Is that sufficiently low power for this little experiment, do you think?

Thanks!
Matt

7

I think only the paint can answer that question definitively! Good luck and do report
back what you find.