Rajesh K T's Arduino UNO Clone Shows True Flexibility — Literally
The "Flexduino" offers everything you'd expect from an Arduino UNO compatible — but on a floppy PCB substrate.
Developer and design engineer Rajesh K T has designed an Arduino UNO clone with a difference: this fully-functional development board bends with the best, thanks to the use of a flexible PCB substrate.
"I love Arduinos," K T explains of the inspiration behind the project, "and I love to make my own versions of Arduinos — but have you ever seen a flexible Arduino? Well, I made a flexible Arduino."
The board itself is a clone of the classic Arduino UNO, which uses a Microchip AVR microcontroller — rather than the newer, and somewhat more electronically complex, Arduino UNO R4 family. The usual DIP-packaged ATmega328PB, though, has been swapped out for a surface-mount option — a flexible board not being terribly flexible if you add a rigid chip for a spine, of course.
The layout of the PCB is functionally the same as any other, but the substrate is demonstrably different: instead of rigid copper and fiberglass layers, it's made of a flexible plastic that can bend and deform on demand. The result is a device capable of confirming to curved or otherwise uneven surfaces — or, if you'd prefer, a fidget toy that doubles as a functional Arduino UNO compatible development board.
While the PCB itself is flexible, though, the components upon it remain steadfastly rigid. Researchers are working on solving that, designing soft supercapacitors and flexible batteries to serve as power sources, bendable displays, and even flexible processors — which, if combined into a single cohesive system, could allow for a fully-flexible device.
As with most modern PCB manufacturing, the board was produced at a commercial fab using design files K T uploaded via a simple web interface — and the full process is documented in the video embedded above and on K T's YouTube channel.