Fueling imaginations

Most conductive and resistive fabrics can be easily cut with a laser.

Felting techniques illustrate how an inclinometer and rotary position sensor is constructed from conductive thread and resistive thread from Eeonyx.

This simple controller is inspired by the south African kalimba. The kalimba lends itself to rapid assembly because of its use of a single central bar held down by two screws to trap the array of tines between two pivot points.

Wooden tines are used in this prototype because they are faster to shape than the traditional metal and this controller doesn’t require the tines to be tuned. The flexibility of copper tape is exploited as strips follow the contour of the flat base around the curve of a half-round pressure pivot.

a qprox demo board is used to demonstrate proximity sensing with e-textiles

This controller demonstrates how most resistive touch screen systems can be modified to provide independent sensing of two positions on the surface. A single pressure measurement is also provided with a third sensing layer.

A pair of SlideWide sensors (http://infusionsystems.com) are stuck to each other at right angles.

Button array music controllers have a long history. I was fortunate to meet the late great, Salvatore Martirano who pioneered the construction of large button array music synthesizers. I saw him set up and play has Salmar Construction at IRCAM in the 1980's.

My modest contribution to this rich space is to enhance the illuminated button arrays (in this case from Sparkfun) with pressure sensitive resistive fabric.

This controller with no direct antecedents is made by draping conductive stretchable fabric over a cereal bowl creating a curve related to the famous one called the witch [sic] of Agnesi.
Resistive strips around the bowl are shorted out by the fabric and the varying resistances are
measured and sent via USB to control software on a host computer.

A collection of power sources for e-textile and wearables projects.

Piezoresistive fabric is sandwiched by sewn rows of vertical and horizontal pads using a basic sewing machine's custom embroidery pattern.

This wireless variant of Hannah Perner Wilson's fabric tilt sensor uses embroidereded high electrical resistance thread . I designed the tool path to create a resistive track from the patches that can be used as a potential divider . This results in a more continuous estimate of the ball location than is suggsted by the six apparently-discrete patches.