Skip to content

5. E-textiles

Research

describe what you see in this image

E-textiles are textiles combined with electronics to create fabrics that can light up, sense touch, detect movement, or react to the environment. They use materials like conductive thread, conductive fabric, soft sensors, and small boards such as Lilypad, Arduino, or Microbit.

What I Wanted to Learn

I wanted to understand how electronics can be integrated into fabric, how soft circuits work, and how simple textile sensors can be created for wearable projects.

What I Found

  1. Soft Circuits

Soft circuits are sewn circuits using conductive thread instead of wires. They connect LEDs, sensors, and boards directly onto fabric.

  1. Conductive Materials

E-textiles use special materials like conductive fabric, conductive thread, copper tape, and resistive fabrics that allow electricity to flow through textile surfaces.

  1. Textile Sensors

There are fabric-based sensors such as pressure sensors, stretch sensors, and touch sensors. These sensors change resistance when the fabric is pressed, stretched, or touched.

  1. Microcontrollers

Boards like Lilypad, Microbit, and Arduino are used to read the sensors and control outputs like LEDs or sound.

Inspirations

I explored different projects in wearable tech, soft sensors, and interactive textiles. These included modular clothing, lighting textiles, and touch-reactive fabrics. (Place pictures here.)

weekly assignment

Check out the weekly assignment here or login to your NuEval progress and evaluation page.

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.

  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. Remove tips when you don't need them anymore!

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 & Inspiration

"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."

  • Two images side-by-side

describe what you see in this image describe what you see in this image


  • Image reference

centered image with credits/reference
  • 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

My sketches are ...

This schematic 1 was obtained by..

This tutorial 2 was created using..

footnote fabrication files

Fabrication files are a necessary element for evaluation. You can add the fabrication files at the bottom of the page and simply link them as a footnote. This was your work stays organised and files will be all together at the bottom of the page. Footnotes are created using [ ^ 1 ] (without spaces, and referenced as you see at the last chapter of this page) You can reference the fabrication files to multiple places on your page as you see for footnote nr. 2 also present in the Gallery.

Code Example

Use the three backticks to separate code.

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
}

Results

Video

From Vimeo

Sound Waves from George Gally (Radarboy) on Vimeo.

From Youtube

---

Fabrication files

  1. File: xxx ↩

  2. File: xxx ↩