Fueling imaginations

A hard ball is surrounded by crumpled resistive fabric (nylon and spande)x and trapped by a round ball of silicone with holes in it. Sensing in various orientations is achieved by wrapping conductors between the holes of the silicon ball.

A loop of conductive thread is sewn on either side of the base fabric under the flaps. An inverted toggle from a clasp for jeans is used to short each conductor lowering the resistance of the loop.

I showed e-textile wearables, some of my materials collection and many soft circuits including musical instruments. The wearable theme continues for the month of March. You can see many of the things I showed as part of an exhibit that includes great works from local wearables artist Grace Kim, Hannah Perner-Wilson, and Leah Buechley.

Iron on a small strip of the copper fabric to a non-conductive base.

Cut the fabric, and fold over a small section and iron it to itself creating a small flap.

Attach another piece of fabric, and iron it close enough to come in contact with the small flap.

This simple-to-build lamp uses a flexible LED strip with both back and front firing surface mount LED's to create rich interactions with both paper and the surface the lamp is placed on.

The back firing yellow LED's are diffused by the paper. Light from the rear firing red LED's is scattered and illuminates the water mark thru the paper. Direct and scattered light interacts at the edges of the cylinder.

A gap in the plastic tape holding the tube together create a slit of light projected behind the lamp.

This demonstrator demonstrates force sensing resistance. It is made on adapting a sample (obtainable as a business card) from Sensitronics. Conductive copper plated fabric tape holds the coin cell down and
provides connections to the silver ink on the mylar film. A gull wing led is taped in series with the FSR and coin cell to illustrate current flow when the black flap of piezoresistive polymer ink is pressed down onto the interdigitated conductive array.

There is a hole in the felt between the vertical and conductive strips. The conductors are secured in this small example by hot melt adhesive.

This digital multimeter is useful for evaluating textiles and thread for conductivity and electrical resistance.
Because each colored led have a different forward voltage different “scales are provided”, Blue is good for low resistance, Green for middle, and red for higher resistance.

It is is easily built by soldering the anode or cathode of the RGB led (the longest lead) to the appropriate battery terminal.

The other leads are twisted with round nosed jewelry pliers into spirals.

This led flasher uses a conventional astable multivbrator (with LED's in the emitters) but unconventionally uses conductive felt for the mechanical and electrical connections and to form the resistors.

This textile was woven by Christy Matson. There are many applications of this approach. Here I show that it can be used for zoned proximity sensing using a qprox capacitance sensing chip. Pressure sensing can be achieved by felting in a resistive felt at the intersections.