Electronics for Breakfast: 3D printed conducting vegemite

When Professor Marc in het Panhuis was working on developing soft and edible materials for applications in soft robotics and bio-medicine, he only needed to look at his breakfast table for inspiration.

The iconic Australian Vegemite is ideal for 3D printing edible electronics. It contains water so it’s not a solid and can easily be extruded using a 3D printer. Also, it’s salty, so it conducts electricity.

In electronics, a breadboard is used to create and test circuits, so in this case, why not a real bread-board? Wholemeal, that is.

In this video, Prof. in het Panhuis 3D-prints his vegemite on the bread and completes the circuit, lighting up an LED.

Of course, the spread is safe to eat and you can imagine how they can be used to make ingestible biomedical sensors that perform a function (in the stomach for example) and are then processed by the body in a natural way.

Other applications for these edible electronics include kits to teach children about electronic circuits – that they can eat afterwards!