How to Make Your Own iPad Capacitive Pen or Stylus
I just figured out a new way to make your own capacitive pen or stylus for any capacitive touchscreen device (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.). For less than $5! This is a totally new way that I haven’t seen anywhere else online. No foam, no foil, no sponges. You just need two things: an object with a 3-4 mm writing surface and some wire glue.
Start first by getting some wire glue. Wire glue is an electrically conductive bonding agent you can use in place of solder. You can buy it at ThinkGeek.com for $3.99. I had stumbled across the stuff when I was doing one of my far-too-frequent shopping trips for the latest and greatest on ThinkGeek.
Next, coat whatever you want to use as your writing/stylus instrument with the wire glue and let it dry completely. Be sure to coat far enough up the stylus where your fingers will touch it. The wire glue will conduct the electricity from your finger to the tip. Here’s the tricky part: you need a writing surface that will be at least 3-4 mm in width. It seems at present, the touchscreens on the market need this big of a surface to register the capacitance distortion. That’s why all those brush, foam, and rubber based styli are that wide. Anything smaller and your iPad won’t register it.
Here you see I’ve used a Q-Tip and flattened the tip to about 4 mm. Making sure my fingers touched the glue coating (I didn’t want to coat the whole Q-Tip so I used just a little bit at the tip). Voila! I now have my own capacitive stylus. I’m going to experiment a bit with this and see if I can mix the wire glue with something like glossy paint or nail polish without losing the electrical conductance of the wire glue while making the surface a bit smoother.
I had originally wanted to figure a solution out because I didn’t like the feel of the foam- or rubber-based pens out there. Until they make the capacitive touchscreen a bit more sensitive, I guess we’ll be dependent on the app makers to respond with pen strokes that output a finer point. Here are some other solutions out there if you just want to buy something a little bit slicker:
February 21, 2012 @ 07:40
Hello,
Thank you for the great tutorial on the wire glue stylus. Did you find a good way to make the finish smooth and less scratchy?
Susan
February 24, 2012 @ 06:45
I achieved limited success by sanding it down with very fine sandpaper. Unfortunately, the material is just naturally porous when dried so there’s only so much you can do. I haven’t had it scratch my iPad yet, though I don’t tend to press very hard.
February 22, 2016 @ 01:42
First of all, love your helpful vids. Well spekon, minimal, and relevant.For this subject, however, I think the size and shape of the artist’s hand play too much of a role for your advice to be universally helpful. I, for instance, have a larger hand than you. I tried your technique and I can see how it would be beneficial. Having one’s fingers in close proximity to buttons and freeing up their individual tasks so that they never have to do more than one job at a time happens to also be PC Gamer Hotkey Customization 101. Your method just mechanically won’t work for me.If it is helpful to anyone with large, thin hands, I keep the buttons toward the bottom and use a rolling action of the thumb to press either button. However, I never use the buttons in such a way that I must keep them depressed while making a stroke. In my case, they are for grip-panning and color sampling, which occurs quickly and never during a stroke.Also, the eraser is actually quite nice in some cases, especially if you prefer to use a tip that creates friction. You may want the option to switch to a tip that has much less friction than the more sensitive drawing tip. It is also useful for approximating the feel of brushes that emulate large, blunt mediums, such as rounded pastel or thick charcoal. I find it also gives a very intuitive feel to large-scale airbrush [for erasing, burning, masking, ect].
May 8, 2016 @ 03:01
I agree with all of your points and know that this technique is limiting in use. At the time I wrote it, there just weren’t that many great pen/pencil stylus options. Since then, great products like Paper 53’s Pencil and Apple’s own Pencil give me a lot more feel and control over prior offerings. I offered this hack as a budget-friendly workaround until these products came out. I think to your point, however, if you found a plain stylus you liked, but dipped the entire thing in the electrically conductive bonding agent, you could overcome the need to be so close to the tip for touch. I haven’t tried it though, but I think it might work in theory. Thanks for commenting and please be sure to visit again!