Fabricademy: eTextiles + Wearables II
Overview This lecture is the second eTextile and wearable class developed for Fabricademy 2018. You can see the full lecture here. Enjoy 🙂 Resources VISUAL Neopixels Sewable Neopixels Neopixel Effect Generator Adafruit Neopixel Uberguide Library installation Powering Fiber Optics The Beginners Guide to Fiber Optics by MikaelaHolmes Lateral optical fibers by Datapaulette Lulu Project by […]
Custom Mono Amp for Textile Speakers
If you want to work with textile or paper speakers, this is a handy tool to have around. You can use it to connect your speakers to any device with an audio output like this: TOOLS Diagonal snips Wire stripper Soldering iron Lighter MATERIALS Lipo socket Mono amp Audio cable Alligator clip Heat shrink (different […]
Heating Circuits for Thermochromic Inks
Thermochromic ink changes state in the presence of heat. When any heat source is applied (e.g. body heat, hair dryer, or electrical current), the pigment turns colorless. Here we will assume you want to use current to control the pigment color change. In this overview, we’ll look at: Variables to consider Heating elements Circuits Choosing […]
Thermochromic Tests
Thermochromic pigments change states when you introduce heat. You can control how much it changes by passing current through resistive thread or other resistive materials. Here are a few tests with different threads and resistances. For more information on how it works, the circuit, and other resources, go here. Thread: Stainless steel Resistance: 10.2 ohms […]
Soft Sensors
Circuit Here is the voltage divider circuit to use to connect your soft switch to an Arduino. If you want to learn more about voltage dividers, check out this post by Sparkfun or this post by Kobakant. Code Here are links to different Arduino sketches you can use with these sensors: Fabric Sensors. This combines […]
LED Sunset Tester
I have been wanting to play around with using Kapton sheets as a circuit base for a while now after seeing all the fun things Kobakant has been making with it (like this Ohm Broach). I decided to create a quick LED tester that I can plug right into the Arduino instead of having to […]
eTextiles as a Site for Speculative Storytelling
I wrote this recently for an application and while I have no formal, more contextual place to share it at the moment, it sums up much of the thinking I have been doing over the last 6 months. The power of speculative fiction lies in its ability to suspend the ingrained stories we tell ourselves […]
Tell Tale Quilt Process
Here is the technical documentation for the Tell Tale Quilt project: DESCRIPTION We use quilts to memorialize histories and tell stories, to protect us and comfort us. But quilts also lay silently, storing our memories. They know how we sleep, when we get cold, when we cry into them, when we need protection, how many […]
Soft Circuit Storytelling at Virginia Children’s Engineering Conference
Overview I was invited to give a workshop by the wonderful folks at the Virginia Children’s Engineering Conference to 50 elementary school teachers. Participants built blinky name tags that showed our emotions, learned about how electricity moves, questioned how different LEDs “eat” voltage, collaboratively wrote stories, and created our own interactive storybook covers out of paper, […]
Computational Craft Zines!
This summer, Becky Stewart gave a wonderful workshop on the Math Behind Circuits. Instead of lecturing us at a white board (which she would never do anyway), Becky busted out that wonderful little nostalgic nugget of punk self-publishing: the zine. So broadly applicable, so unintimidating – a perfect format for teaching complex topics to novices. […]