Will our future electrical devices be throwaway devices? It is now possible to print electrical circuits on a piece of paper. It is also possible to create plastic batteries and to increase their power by adding layers. These two methods of production readily lend themselves to really cheap production methods. Think of it this way, it just might be possible to buy a cell phone for a couple of dollars in the future and just throw it away if you get sick of it, it breaks, or a hot new slick style comes out that you must have. Even plastic screens are in the works. Think of the potential. Ultra light circuits that could be used in many different things, even satellites. As a matter of fact, this would cut the cost of satellite launches because it cuts down weight. I was thinking about this, when a light went off. I realized that maybe it might be possible to change one appliance into a completely different one, if we could just pop out the paper circuit sheet and replace it with a different one. Now you would have a device that could perform many different functions. It might be a camera at one moment and then a computer in the next. What if you had a portfolio of these paper circuits in a holder that fits into you pocket? Think of what you might be able to do.

You take you PDA (personal digital assistant) into your car as you head out on a trip. You have heard that one area is particularly bad for speeding tickets, so you take out your pda and pop in a new paper circuit board. Now you pda becomes a radar scanner and lets you know if the police are scanning for speeders. When you arrive at your destination, you decide to call home and let everyone know you are alright, so you take out your trusty device, pop out the scanner circuits and replace them with cell phone circuits and call home. All is well on both ends. You are laying in bed bored, you don't have a tv in your room (its a real cheap room), so again you take out your device, and put the tv and radio circuit card into it. Now you can relax and watch your shows or listen to your radio programs, if you can get the reception. You know that the area that you are going into is a high crime area, so you now insert the circuit board into your device that can deliver an electrical charge to ward off any assault attempts, your device is now a stunner.

This is not the end of your choices for circuit boards for your device, far from it. You are not in the best of health so you carry a variety of medical circuit boards with you. There is one that can turn your device into a blood pressure measuring device and another that allows you to measure the sugar in your blood for your diabetes and it can also inject insulin into your blood. It has another function and that is as an electronic thermometer.

Yes, paper circuits present us with quite a few options. Think about it, they are practically free to create. I mean, how much does a piece of paper and a little special ink cost? Because of this, it should be quite simple to repair any device using these things. You could just throw away the old circuit paper and replace it with a new one. This assumes that something won't be done to prevent you from doing this, such as making a plastic device that is molded around the paper circuits , meaning that you would have to practically destroy the device to get to the circuits. Even this might be ok if the device was being sold for a dollar or so. There might also be plans on the internet that are free to print out different circuits that will turn your device into other things if you have the ability to print these new circuits on your printer at home. It might just be a matter of having to buy special conductive ink.

Medical equipment is getting more complex every day, this makes it extremely expensive. A multi purpose device might be able to use these cheap paper circuits to perform complex medical operations. You could just place the correct paper circuit into the machine and it would perform the task. There might be many advantages to this. First of all, this makes the machine really much simpler since it will act as a single purpose machine and all its complex circuitry will be on the paper circuit. It will probably be a much lower voltage device also. To make the paper circuit board more durable, it could be printed on oak tag and covered with a plastic coating with just the contacts exposed. If we can print the circuits small enough, the board might only be the size of a memory card.

Devices this versatile could play a very important role on the battlefield. Think of it this way, you are a solder working with a robot. You have about 20 of these little cards with you. You get wounded and bring the robot to you. You put in a rescue card and the robot helps to get you off the battlefield. You change the card again and it becomes a transmitter and beams a coded message for medical help. Now its time to change to a defense card and the robot will now protect you from the enemy. The medical crew has a secret signal that alerts the robot that it is friendly and signals it not to shoot.

As weird as it sounds, it just might be possible to print all these circuit boards on one piece of paper and if you need a replacement, the robot might have a printer built in that can supply new electronic boards for damaged ones. Isn't technology cool?

The batteries are going to be just as functional as the circuit boards. They will be made of a special plastic that can hold a charge and be in the form of a sheet. To increase the voltage, just place sheets of batteries on top of each other. They will be much lighter than current batteries and might even have a way of recharging, using a fuel cell. Just add alcohol and you are good for hours, when the batteries finally get low, add a little more. The fuel cell itself might be used without batteries in small devices, such as lap tops and even that multipurpose device we spoke of above. One canteen of alcohol might be enough to power something for days on end.

One of the reasons that the circuit boards will be so cheap is not only the fact that they will be made on paper, but also the fact that they can be created by a modified ink jet printer. Can you imagine a $100 printer producing thousands and thousands of circuit boards? Even the cpu in a computer might be made this way some day. The batteries being made of cheap plastic will also be extremely economical.

Here is the bottom line, we might actually be capable of building complex electrical devices for only a few pennies in the future, if the corporations allow this, but I wouldn't get my hopes up yet, this would cut down severely on their profits, after all, how could they demand thousands of dollars for devices made of paper, ink and plastic?