Laminated Aluminum Foil for Flexible Circuits and Much More

LAF stands for Laminated Aluminum Foil - in this case I will be using household aluminum foil that is laminated with regular packing tape. It is strong, durable, and tear-resistant. It is flexible, conductive, easily cut, shaped, folded or printed on. It is cheap and easily made. It can be used for countless purposes: flexible circuits with buttons, slim durable wallets, keychains, and even origami.

In this Instructable I will show how to make LAF, and how to use it for many different purposes, especially for making flexible electronics. The example I will be giving for LAF's usefulness in flexible electronics is how to make a fully functioning flexible membrane computer numpad.

I discovered LAF's usefulness almost by accident. I was searching for a material to make a wallet out of and I stumbled upon LAF. Later I began to explore it's possibilities and saw that it had great potential in a many fields and tons of possible applications. I hope that you will also find it as useful as I have, especially because it extremely cheap and easy to make.

Step 1: Materials and Tools

For this project you will need very few materials that are cheaply and easily obtained:

Aluminum foil

Clear packing tape

Credit card or other plastic card

Smooth and clean work surface

Additional materials to make a flexible numpad:

X-Acto Knife/Craft Knife

Old keyboard (it has to still work)

Srewdriver

Comments

[prometheus442]

I would really like to use this to make alternative input devices for computers and synthesizers. It looks really cool.

But I'm wondering. How are the circuits not bridged when a button is not being pressed? Maybe it would help if you show how the layers of LAF are stacked on top of each other.