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5. E-textiles

Electronic textiles or E-textiles are fabrics that have electronics and interconnections woven into them. They are fabrics capable of transforming, collecting, and transmitting data, as well as storing and conducting energy, have been a textile innovation that is gaining momentum and changing perceptions of what conventional fabrics are. Personally, this topic is very new to me, and although it can be a little scary to venture into the unknown, the truth is that it is very exciting to experiment with all the possibilities that this textiles offer us.

The main challenges for this week will be:

  • Understanding the principles of basic electronics applied to textiles.

  • Experimenting with different possibilities and techniques for sensors and conductive elements.

  • Creating a hard soft circuit on fabric.

RESEARCH

Textiles are like our second skin, and although early populations used them mainly to cover their bodies—since, unlike animals, they lacked fur to protect them from extreme cold and other weather conditions—they had to cover themselves with the skins of hunted animals, leaves, or plants to survive the harsh climate and various environmental hazards during their daily activities. However, fabrics have revolutionized their functions, with innovations that go beyond simply covering the body to understanding it, understanding its environment, its movement, and becoming devices with different purposes. These textile innovations, such as e-textiles, have become highly relevant by incorporating electronics into their composition, but what are e-textiles?

In a short definition I found in this fascinating book "Tejidos Inteligentes ":

“They are fabrics that can transform, collect, and transmit data, store and conduct energy, as well as house lightweight, flexible, incredibly small, and washable computers...”

Soft Circuits

describe what you see in this image

Within e-textiles, there are systems that make these connections possible, and they can be achieved through “soft circuits,” which are electronic circuits with “soft” properties, usually meaning that they have multi-axial flexibility and can be folded in ways that a flexible printed circuit board usually cannot. Researching these circuits further, I found that there are two types: one consists of connecting electronic components to soft conductors, and the other consists of creating components from the conductor itself, soft circuits with built-in electronics that consist of joining motors, LEDs, and sensors on a soft, flexible substrate to create a kind of “hybrid” circuit. And, Soft circuits as integrated electronics: This type uses conductive paths to create new electronic components such as capacitive touch sensors that can be incorporated into applications such as wearable technology. With this information and this week's assignment, I hope to gain a clear understanding of how e-textiles work so that I can implement them in wearables week.

Components

  • Conductive Materials:

  • LEDs:

  • Batteries

  • Sensors
  • Microcontrollers:
weekly assignment

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about your images..delete the tip!!

  1. Remember to credit/reference all your images to their authors. Open source helps us create change faster together, but we all deserve recognition for what we make, design, think, develop.

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get inspired!

Check out and research alumni pages to betetr understand how to document and get inspired

Add your fav alumni's pages as references

References

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

Traveling ligth/Droplet/Marble in a moment/Droppa


Threaded Frequencies


Decorative zodiac embroidery



Inspiration

Textiles Artists, Innovative weaves
  • Download reference

Links to reference files, PDF, booklets,

about your images..

  1. Remember to credit/reference all your images to their authors. Open source helps us create change faster together, but we all deserve recognition for what we make, design, think, develop.

  2. remember to resize and optimize all your images. You will run out of space and the more data, the more servers, the more cooling systems and energy wasted :) make a choice at every image :) This image is optimised in size with resolution 72 and passed through tinypng for final optimisation.

Tools

Process and workflow

Understanding the process

Basic circuit

For me, the topic of electronics has been really new and to understand a little bit more about it, it was neccesary to understand the most basic thing, wichi is how a basic circuit works and recognize the function of every component as well as the different variations that can be made and the effects of this. That´s why I started to understand and learn positive and negative of a led and the power source and how this circuit needs to be closed.

Basic circuit with LED and battery


After this, I continue learning about the various components I could use to transfer energy in a circuit, and I also learn the importance of a good connections by a good soldering or sewing. For this practice, I wanted to use regular metallic objetcs as circuit brakers and buttons as well as resistors that at the same time, I learned that the importance of these components are to limit or regulate the flow of electrical current and split voltages, protecting sensitive components from overloads.

Different materials and techniques:

Cupper tape
Textile conductive thread
Conductive metallic elements
Resistors
Switch

This was my first time with soldering and I really enjoyed to get good connections and not loss of conductivity between components.

Scheme

Basic circuit with LED and battery


Arduino IDE

Arduino IDE is an Open-source electronic prototyping platform that allow users to create interactive electronic objects. To start using this platform you can download Here

Once you

Download arduino


Configuration for microcontroller


Select Port


Verify and upload code


Once I learned how soft circuits works, I started to experiment and try hard circuits with Arduino. For this attempts I tried with:

Buzzer

Squeme of buzzer circuit 


#define BUZZER_PIN 6
#define NOTE_DO 262
#define NOTE_RE 294
#define NOTE_MI 330

void setup() {
pinMode(BUZZER_PIN, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
tone(BUZZER_PIN, NOTE_DO);
delay(300);
tone(BUZZER_PIN, NOTE_RE);
delay(300);
tone(BUZZER_PIN, NOTE_MI);
delay(300);
noTone(BUZZER_PIN);
delay(500); // pequeña pausa antes de repetir
}

To increase the difficulty and getting familiar with arduino, I tried with a potenciometer and a noodle LED to control the intensity of the LED

Potentiometer

The making of a circuit with potenciometer 


const int pinPot = D0;      // Potenciómetro conectado al pin A0 (D26)
const int pinLED = D10;       // LED LilyPad en D1

void setup() {
pinMode(pinLED, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
int valorPot = analogRead(pinPot); // Leer valor entre 0 y 4095 (12 bits en RP2040)

// Mapear el valor de 0-4095 a 0-255 para usar en PWM
int brillo = map(valorPot, 0, 4095, 0, 255);

analogWrite(pinLED, brillo);  // Ajustar brillo del LED (PWM)

delay(10); // Pequeño delay para estabilidad
}

Velostat

In this assigment, the elements that make me feel excited were sensor because it is a material that you can control by touch, Velostat is a "polymer material covered in black carbon, which allows conductivity through the material. The advantage is that under pressure or torsion, its resistance changes, and by measuring this, you can determine the pressure or movement".

To construct my velostat I follow the documentation of Mar

The making of a sensor with velostat

Squeme

Code

const int velostatPin = D2;
const int ledPin = D6;

void setup() {
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
int pressure = analogRead(velostatPin);

if (pressure < 600) {   // ahora es inverso
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
} else {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
}
}

Flowers in action

For a final project for this assignment I wanted to bring a field of flowers to life combining 2 kind of Leds, LED diode and spaghetti LEDs and make a circuit to controlate light power

I started with basic codes to check the first LEDs were working and then I started to add the other components and finally I asked Chat GPT for a code to make the circuit work. In this work I realized the importance of resistors because the first time the intensity of one of the diode LED was too low until I exchanged it for another one, I also realized about the importance of a good sewing and I find this kind of tutorial to do it better How-to-Sew-LEDs-and-Resistors-to-Fabric

Code

// Pines
const int ledBlink1 = D4;
const int ledBlink2 = D2;
const int ledPot1   = D7;
const int ledPot2   = D6;
const int pinPot    = D0;  // Potenciómetro (pata central)

// Variables
int valorPot = 0;
int brillo = 0;

void setup() {
pinMode(ledBlink1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledBlink2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPot1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPot2, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
// --- LEDs que parpadean ---
digitalWrite(ledBlink1, HIGH);
digitalWrite(ledBlink2, HIGH);
delay(300);
digitalWrite(ledBlink1, LOW);
digitalWrite(ledBlink2, LOW);
delay(300);

// --- LEDs controlados por el potenciómetro ---
valorPot = analogRead(pinPot);            // Lee el potenciómetro (0–4095)
brillo = map(valorPot, 0, 4095, 0, 255);  // Convierte a rango PWM

analogWrite(ledPot1, brillo);
analogWrite(ledPot2, brillo);
}