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5. E-textiles

Research & Inspiration

I began my research looking at Stephanie Vilayphiou's page to better understand the assignment and get inspired.

Most of the projects were over my head, but it was helpful to compile a list of artists/designers/organizations/resources that I want to spend more time with and understand further:

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Claire Williams: Series of knit explorations that translate, generate, and encode data within a textile surface. * Data Knits * Data Knitting Workshops * Spectrograms


Unstable Design Lab: research lab housed within the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Exciting body of research around many of the skills covered in Fabricademy. So many inspiring projects, but here are a few related to this weeks topic

  • Unfabricate "Unfabricate is a project that anticipate the future of e-waste compounding with textile waste. Shanel Wu leverages the quality of textiles as being adhesive-less to envision new methods for designing smart textiles for disassembly."
  • Yarny Yarn Recipes: "A catalog of the various conductive and non-conductive yarns we hand-spun to bring a range of textures, aesthetics and overall 'yarniness' to our interactive textile prototypes"
  • Knitting Access: Study on how knitted textile interfaces can fit meaningfully into the lives of people with disabilities as sensors and display.

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Irene Posch: researcher/artist exploring the integration of technological development into the fields of art and craft, and vice versa, and social, cultural, technical and aesthetic implications.

Knitting Technology : A Comprehensive Handbook and Practical Guide | D. J. Spencer

Resources & References

For this assignments, I referenced Liza Stark's E-textile Lecture and Nuria Robles's Electronics in Textiles tutorial.

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CETI Institute The CETI Community Technology Lab at is a resource at Portland State University providing access to cutting-edge technology, tools, support, and expertise to create, experiment, prototype, fabricate, innovate, with emerging technologies and media. I took advantage of their open lab hours and library to access information needed for this week's assignment.

This book in particular was my lifesaver this week:

Kate Hartman - Make: Wearable Electronics: Design, Prototype, and Wear Your Own Interactive Garments

Tools

  • LED / LED Battery
  • Alligator Clips / Conductive Thread /Adhesive Conductive Fabric
  • Adafruit Circuit Playground
  • Arduino IDE

Process and workflow

Building Circuts and Switches

I used Nuria Robles's Electronics in Textiles tutorial to create some initial switches and circuits using alligator clips. Below are videos creating the switch using the foil sandwich demonstrated in Wednesday's tutorial and a felt button using conductive fabric.

Programming the Microcontroller

I worked through the exercises Kate Hartman's book to learn how to to program the microcontroller. It does a nice job of explaining what the different elements of the code are for complete newbies.

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STEP 1: Ensuring the proper set up by checking USB Connection (make sure to acquire a data rather than charging cable) and the Board Type. The Flora controller from out shopping list was not an option on the list of Board types so I ended up using an Adifruit Circuit Playground given to me by the CETI Institute.

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STEP 2: Blink Sketch I used the Blink option from the examples to upload my first sketch. From there I adjusted the numbers in the values in delay the to adjust the frequeny of the blinking. Below are the screenshots of the code and videos of the various value adjustments - 1000, 5000, and 500.

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STEP 3: Connecting an LED Using alligator clips I was able to connect a sewable LED on to pin A1 using alligator clips. To do this I uploaded the code in the screentshot below. Once programmed I disconnected the microcontroller from the computer and connected it to the battery pack.

Glove Experiement

I was eager to integrate LED into an actual project. Continuing with my hand gesture explorations from Week 2: Digital Bodies I experimented with creating a circuit on a glove tha would activate a light at the time of the index finger. I used a combination of images from Kate Hartman's book and Irene Posch's Biking Gloves Tutorial to understand what needed to happen.

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Code Example

Code for blinking LED

int LEDpin = A1; // initialize the variable

void setup() { pinMode(LEDpin, OUTPUT); // set the pin mode }

void loop () { digitalWrite (LEDpin, HIGH); // turn LED on delay(1000); digitalWrite(LEDpin, LOW); //turn LED off delay(1000) }