E-TEXTILE¶
RESEARCH¶
What is E-textile¶
E-textiles — or electronic textiles — are materials where technology gently lives within the fabric. They are made by combining threads, fibers, and electronics — like conductive yarns, sensors, LEDs, and microcontrollers — all connected through weaving, embroidery, or printing.
E-textiles are like fabric starting to breathe with technology.
There are two main kinds:
⇝ Passive e-textiles, which carry electrical signals — for example, fabric with conductive paths connecting small devices.
⇝ Active e-textiles, which can sense, react, or light up — for example, a shirt that tracks body temperature, or a jacket that glows in the dark.
They are used in fashion to create dresses that change color; in medicine, for fabrics that monitor heart rate or muscle movement; in sports, to study body motion; and in the military, for uniforms that communicate or provide protection in extreme conditions.
What makes e-textiles special is their dual nature — soft but intelligent, aesthetic but functional. They still feel like fabric, flexible and breathable, yet they can collect data, show emotion, or respond to the body.
When I think about e-textiles, it feels like fabric comes alive — no longer silent, but gently speaking through light, heat, or movement. It’s where design meets technology, and where human touch meets innovation.
A report from Cientifica Research examines the market for textile-based wearable technologies, the companies producing them, and the enabling innovation. The report identifies three distinct generations of textile wearable technologies:
A few words about this
⋆ "First-generation" wearables attach a sensor to apparel. This approach is currently taken by sportswear brands such as Adidas, Nike, and Under Armour.
⋆ "Second-generation" products embed the sensor in the garment, as demonstrated by current products from Samsung, Alphabet, Ralph Lauren, and Flex.
⋆ In "third-generation" wearables, the garment is the sensor. A growing number of companies are creating pressure, strain, and temperature sensors for this purpose.
INSPIRATION¶
Inspiration No.1 — Leah Buechley¶
On Anush's E-textile page I found creators who listen to what materials want to say. One of them is Leah Buechley. She is an American educator, engineer and designer who is best known as the developer of the LilyPad Arduino toolkit and other smart textiles. The design that insired me most is her work on whalpaper called "Living Wall".
Living Wall, an interactive wallpaper by — Leah Buechley that can be programmed to control lighting and sound, and generally serve as a way to enrich environments with computation.
Who says wallflowers don’t grab people’s attention? A new type of electronically enhanced wallpaper promises not only eye-pleasing designs, but also the ability to activate lamps and heaters – and even control music systems.
Interactive walls are nothing new, but most rely on expensive sensors and power-hungry projectors to make the wall come alive. Now the Living Wall project, led by Leah Buechley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, offers an alternative by using magnetic and conductive paints to create circuitry in attractive designs.
When combined with cheap temperature, brightness and touch sensors, LEDs and Bluetooth, the wall becomes a control surface able to “talk” to nearby devices. You can touch a flower to turn on a lamp, for example, or set heaters to fire up when the room gets cold.
“Our goal is to make technologies that users can build on and change without needing a lot of technical skill,” says Buechley.
To create the wallpaper, the team started with steel foil sandwiched between layers of paper that are coated with magnetic paint – acrylic paint infused with iron particles. Over this base they paint motifs such as flowers and vines using conductive paint, which uses copper particles rather than iron. The designs form circuits to which sensors, lights and other elements can be attached.
Having exposed circuitry on your wall might sound dangerous, but Buechley says the system runs at 20 volts, drawing around 2.5 amps when fully loaded with devices. “You can go up and touch the wall and not even feel a tingle,” she says.
Buechley says the wallpaper shows how existing technology can be used innovative ways with materials and applications normally considered “low-tech.” She thinks that projects like this will encourage artists to engage more with technology.
Inspiration No. 2 — Anuvad Innovation Studio¶
My next inspiration is Textile Tropics — a beautiful and experimental light installation that connects fabric, color, and atmosphere.
A fabric globe that makes the birds sing as you touch them.
Textile Tropics by Anuvad Innovation Studio for the Conscious Collective by Godrej Design Lab is an interactive, sensory experience simulating an urban forest using electronic textiles developed through traditional crafts.
Textile Tropics is an immersive e-textile installation for the Conscious Collective by Godrej Design Lab, created in collaboration with traditional artisans. The installation offers a simulated walk-through of an urban forest where the audience interacts with the pieces through touch-based stimuli and receives feedback in terms of birdsongs, rustling leaves, and lights. The installation consists of 15 interactive globes, each working independently and wirelessly, yet interconnected within an ecosystem, mirroring nature itself.To encourage people to protect it, the artists chose birds that are commonly found in Indian urban spaces but are often forgotten or ignored.
PHYSICS PART¶
The first time I entered the electronic world was when I started to understand how the closed system of electronics works — the “+” and “–”, which one is which, and how they connect to create movement and light.
I had a few small physics classes to dive deeper into all this, and they helped me see how everything is linked — energy, materials, and form. It was fun and deeply interesting for me to discover new knowledge, new technologies, and a completely new direction in design.
To begin, we should remember what an atom is — and what it’s made of.
Even though atoms are impossibly small, they hold the entire structure of our world. Every material, color, and texture — from metal to fabric, from light to skin — begins with atoms connecting, sharing, or exchanging their electrons.
After this, we know that the positive and negative charges attract each other — and this happens because of the basic law of electricity: opposite charges create a force that pulls them together.
In an atom, the positively charged protons in the nucleus attract the negatively charged electrons that move around them. This invisible attraction is what keeps the atom stable and connected. It’s the same principle that later helps us understand how electricity flows — how energy travels through wires, circuits, and even fabrics when we work with e-textiles.
Now we need to understand what voltage, current, and resistance are — and how they are connected through an equation.
Voltage (V) is the electrical force that pushes electrons through a circuit — like the pressure that makes water flow through a pipe.
Current (I) is the flow itself, the movement of electrons through the material.
Resistance (R) shows how much the material resists that flow — some materials let electricity move easily, others slow it down.
They are connected by a simple but very important relationship called Ohm’s Law:
V=I×R
This means that the voltage equals the current multiplied by the resistance. If the voltage increases, more current can flow; if the resistance is higher, the current becomes weaker. This balance explains how every electronic system works — from a small LED light to a complex textile circuit.
Ohm’s Law can be expressed in three main forms depending on which quantity you want to find:
Digital And Analog¶
When we talk about systems, everything can be divided into digital and analog.
Analog is more like nature — smooth, continuous, always changing step by step. It’s like how light slowly becomes stronger in the morning, or how music flows without cuts.
Digital is different — it thinks in numbers, 0 and 1, on and off. It’s clear, fast, and accurate. You can control and repeat it easily, but sometimes it loses that soft feeling that analog has.
Where They Are Used?
Analog is everywhere around us. It lives in nature — in sound waves, light, temperature, heartbeats. In technology, analog is used in microphones, speakers, old radios, and record players — anything that works with smooth signals. Even our body is analog — our eyes, ears, and skin feel things in continuous ways.
Digital is what rules the modern world. It’s in computers, phones, cameras, and smart devices. Digital systems use codes and signals to store, send, and control data. Microcontrollers like Arduino or Raspberry Pi think digitally — they read 0 and 1, process them, and make things move, light up, or react.
Conductive materials
There’s something almost alive about conductive materials — the way they let electricity flow through them, like tiny rivers of energy. Metals like copper, silver, and aluminum are the stars here, carrying energy and making circuits work.
Strings are the tiny threads that guide this flow. Soft strings like jumper wires let you play, experiment, and move things around, while hard strings like soldered joints hold everything steady and reliable.
In programming, a string is a line of characters — a little message that tells LEDs to blink, motors to spin, or sensors to speak.
IT'S TIME FOR EXPERIMENTS¶
The first thing we did was make a closed connection between the LED, alligator clips, and battery. The LED lamp has two “legs” — one of them is shorter. The shorter leg is the minus (-), and the longer one is the plus (+). We connected the plus leg to the battery’s plus side using alligator clips, and the minus leg to the opposite side. In this way, we created the simplest closed connection.
We can continue the same type of connection using more batteries, clippers, and LEDs.
The next step is makeing connection with breadboard. We connect one red wire from the 5V pin on the Arduino to the positive rail of the breadboard, and one gray wire from a GND pin to the negative rail. Then comes the little star of the show — the LED. Its longer leg reaches toward the positive rail, hungry for power, and the shorter leg dives down to the negative, often through a resistor that gently protects it from too much energy.
Once everything clicks into place, we have a closed circuit — a tiny flow of life: Arduino’s 5V → LED → Ground. And just like that, light!
Start Useing Conductive Matterials¶
The next step is to remove the alligator clips and start using conductive materials, especially copper.
I mix copper with strings, connecting two wires in series, and create a digital system, which I later expand into an analog system.
Pressure-sensitive conductive material, often called a force-sensitive resistor (FSR) or conductive polymer. It’s a pressure-sensitive material that changes its conductivity depending on how hard you press it — the harder you push, the more electricity flows, making lights brighter or motors stronger.
The difference between seies and pararllel curuits:
Series circuit
- Current flow is constant throughout the whole circuit.
- There is a voltage drop across across each component
- There is a linear flow of electrons
Parallel circuit
- Parallel circuit has 2 or more paths that current flows through
- Voltage is the same across each component of the circuit
- There is a non linear flow of electrons
What I Did
PROJECT OF THE WEEK¶
My final project is inspired by the Dilijan mountains and the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life. The Armenian Fab Lab is located in Dilijan, and beyond all the knowledge I’ve gained there, it has given me a real and meaningful story about one of the most beautiful places in Armenia.
A month ago, my boyfriend and I went hiking along one of the trails and stopped at a breathtaking viewpoint to watch the sunset. I took some photos that evening, and those images became the foundation of my work.
After that, I started creating an illustration in Adobe Illustrator to capture the shape of the mountains. Later, I cut it out from colored fabric to bring the image to life in a more tactile way. Of course, the illustration doesn’t show the exact same view, but it shares with you the beauty and feeling of nature that I experienced there.
What illustration I have:
The Cutting And The File¶
I cut all the pieces using a machine, and it was a bit difficult to organize the cut materials — finding the correct parts while also trying to save as much usable fabric as possible for future projects.
The file of cutting- Open Lilit's Mountains PDF
Textile cutting parameters: * Speed: 200 * Min Power: 20 * Max Power: 30
For more cutting parameters, you can visit my Circular Open Source Fashion Week page.
Some parts I cut in the wrong color, so I started mixing them differently and even added one more piece to make the composition more interesting. Because of that, the final result looks a bit different from the original picture, but in any case, it feels really beautiful and special to me.
I made some sketches to see if the result felt right for me and to find the perfect mix of colors and shapes.
SHINING SUN
I chose for my final scene one of my modules from Week 03 — the one where I worked with lights and parallel connections, squeezing the light through the cut fabric pieces. It was fun but also a bit challenging because I had four LEDs whose legs couldn’t touch each other. So I started using conductive strings and layering non-conductive fabric to make sure the positive and negative sides wouldn’t connect. It was really fun building that little construction — a mix of patience, color, and glowing light.
Digital Stars¶
I thought it would be fun to create a sun that moves around the mountains, shining more and more as it goes. Then I wanted to make a second version for the night, with glowing stars in the dark sky. But that would take a lot of time, so Erika and I decided to make only the night version, using two types of stars — some digital and others analog.
At the start of the process I had to sew the mountains onto each other and onto the background. I found a gradient thread that really touched me, and I began building the mountains step by step.
First 3 NeoPixel LED stars would be digital. I sew them in the fabric with conductive thread and make connections plus to plus, minus with minu and the direction with each other. I made threds wisibul only in back side.
I followed this guide to make all my connections. Just look at it⤵
About the stars: They gave me Svetlana’s stars. She made them the previous week and, after seeing what kind of work I’m doing, she gave me the stars she had made. I want to thank her for this beautiful gift.
After this long work, I connected everything to the Adafruit Flora using crocodile clips. It finally started working! Together with Erika, we began writing code in Arduino IDE. We had a base code that Onik made for us, and we put it into ChatGPT, asking for the changes we wanted. The chat adjusted the code to meet our needs. In the end, we made the Flora NeoPixels change their colors when we pressed the touch sensors.
The Arduino Code Which I Used¶
#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
// Parameter 1 = number of pixels in strip
// Parameter 2 = pin number (most are valid)
// Parameter 3 = pixel type flags, add together as needed:
// NEO_RGB Pixels are wired for RGB bitstream
// NEO_GRB Pixels are wired for GRB bitstream
// NEO_KHZ400 400 KHz bitstream (e.g. FLORA pixels)
// NEO_KHZ800 800 KHz bitstream (e.g. High Density LED strip)
#define LED_PIN 6
#define LED_COUNT 3
#define BUTTON_PIN 1 // snap sensor connected to TX pin
Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(LED_COUNT, LED_PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
int buttonState = 0; // variable for reading the snap status
void setup() {
strip.begin();
strip.show(); // Initialize all pixels to 'off'
pinMode(BUTTON_PIN, INPUT);
digitalWrite(BUTTON_PIN, HIGH); // enable pull-up resistor
}
void setAllPixels(uint8_t r, uint8_t g, uint8_t b) {
for (int i = 0; i < LED_COUNT; i++) {
strip.setPixelColor(i, strip.Color(r, g, b));
}
strip.show();
}
void loop() {
// read the state of the snap/button
buttonState = digitalRead(BUTTON_PIN);
if (buttonState == LOW) {
// snap connected → bright yellow
setAllPixels(255, 255, 50);
} else {
// snap disconnected → very faded white
setAllPixels(50, 50, 50);
}
delay(50);
}
ANALOG STARS¶
Analog stars wich I made was small LED light wich connections made by parallel ciruit. To save this connections and use new material for connection i disided to clos first "big" stars connections by non conductive fabric fixing it by boughtside skotches. after i took conductive wires with non conductive close material and started make connections by light plus and minus legs. It took realy long time but for experiment it was fun. i used again my stars adding Pressure-sensitive conductive material betwen conductive copper., took 3v batteri and started experement. Becouse i had a lot of experiments before this this oe come socces by first time.The analog stars I made were small LED lights connected in a parallel circuit. To protect these connections and try new materials, I decided to close the first “big” star’s wiring with non-conductive fabric, fixing it from both sides with tape. After that, I used conductive wires covered with non-conductive material and started connecting the plus and minus legs of each light. It took a really long time, but as an experiment, it was so much fun!
Then, I used my stars again, this time adding pressure-sensitive conductive material between the copper connections. I took a 3V battery and started experimenting — and because of all my previous tests, this one worked successfully on the very first try!
This is how it looks from the bottom side ⤵
