What is the Soft Circuits Toolkit?

The Soft Circuits Toolkit platform is a collection of components, tutorials, and documentation to teach about pneumatic circuits. The toolkit was designed by Catharina (Katrien) M. van Riet in the Soft Robotic Matter group at AMOLF under the supervision of Shibo Zou and Johannes (Bas) T.B. Overvelde and the Industrial Design department at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands under the supervision of Frank Delbressine.

The toolkit allows anyone to prototype fully soft circuits that work on air instead of electricity. These types of pneumatic circuits can be used to create soft robots or intelligent devices such as shape-changing wearables. Because these designs are fully soft, and thus safer for humans to interact with, they show great potential in areas such as healthcare and human-robot interaction. As such, education in designing soft circuits, including pneumatic circuits, is needed. On this website you can find tutorials on how to use the toolkit, complete with step-by-step instructions and example videos.

This work has been published in the journal Soft Robotics. You can read the open-access article here: https://doi.org/10.1177/21695172261462701
This work has been made fully open-source. The data underlying this research have been made available here: https://doi.org/10.4121/4345de36-710c-496d-b6f1-457416be9e32
All the design files can be found on the Fabrication page.

How to get started?

Start by learning about components or building the example circuits! You can also take a look at the manual.