Affordable Neutral Pucks

Construction of Pucks with Affordable Low-Tech Materials

Researchers on surface computing usually design and create their own pucks involving rubbery materials in an elaborated fabrication process. It delivers excellent results in terms of physical properties, customized shapes, and fitting to very specific and specialized situations in digital tabletop applications.

However, quite often we do not actually need such level of sophistication or we do not have enough time to develop our pucks on time… and in addition, for many applications would be fine enough with getting some kind of neutral pucks.

A low-tech solution is shown here to create neutral pucks very quickly and at a low cost. All what we need is simply some materials that can be easily got in any non-specialized hardware store, stationer’s shops, or even supermarkets. In this particular case I have opted for door stops, but any other similar element fitting better to your requirements could be used too. The solution could seem a bit ugly or less cool than other approaches but it is really effective, practical and handy.

Materials

rubbery doorstop
repositionable self-adhesive pads (TAC, patafix, ...)
EVA rubber sheet
pvc self-adhesive book cover sheet
tags printed in regular paper

Assembly

Dismount the doorstop, cut a round piece of EVA, and another of PVC self-adhesive film.

Make a ring with the self-adhesive pad, put the ring on the bottom-side of the doorstop, and fix the EVA round shape on the joint parts.

Put the PVC self-adhesive piece on the tag, and use the adhesive boundaries beyond the tag to fix to the EVA. This PVC piece is not only to keep united the tag to the rubber but it additionally provides significantly longer durability and avoids degradation of the tag since the paper tag alone would get quickly diminished and degraded with little usage. The puck is ready to use. In addition, you could add a printed icon on the top-side of puck to represent the function of this tangible in your system.