building wearables-kristina durivage

Building Wearables

Kristina Durivage @gelicia

Soft Circuits

Top: Hearts A Glow, Embroidery + LED! By Lynne Bruning !http://www.instructables.com/id/Hearts-AGlow/ !!Bottom: Turn Signal Biking Jacket!By Leah Buechley!http://www.instructables.com/id/turn-signal-biking-jacket/

Conductive thread

Quality is sketchy, buy from a good source!

Sewn in components

Either modified normal components or special ones

Special Arduino

SparkFun has the Lilypad line

Adafruit has the FLORA line

Top: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1260 Middle: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9266 Bottom: http://lilypadarduino.org/?p=1483

Soft Circuits

Challenge becomes how to add on non e-textile components to clothing

Get a wider variety of components to choose from

Removable == washable

EL Wire Skirt

Do not think of your battery pack last!

They’re heavy, cumbersome, and necessary!

They might make dancing hard! The horror!!

Lesson Learned

LED Array v1

Lessons Learned?

Don’t procrastinate!

Programming for the Arduino is harder than what I’m used to - start early

PROGMEM is your friend

LEDs do not work like they do in your imagination!

LED Array v2 & v3

Goals

As flexible and durable as possible

Use less pins - more pins for other things

Easy to program

Cheaper

Step 1Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Programming

LED is individually addressable

Program translates (x,y) to an address

Color - reference with one number between 1-384 instead of RGB

Display image

Scroll image

Scroll and alternate image

Tetris!

Joystick breakout board from Adafruit

Integrated with a flexible wire into the sash

Joystick sticks out of fabric (but this actually doesn’t work so well)

Sewing

Circle Skirts!Measure your waist

Math yourself up a radius

Draw a donut in the fabric

Cut out the donut

Add elastic on one side

Hem the other

Voila!

These pictures and a full tutorial are from http://whatthecraft.com/circle-skirt-tutorial-new-and-improved/

Lessons LearnedFind a good, simple base project

Something easy

Something that can be replicated

Something that can be modified easily

Don’t forget power! (remember that one?)

Removable components are a lot easier

Terrycloth diffuses LED light!

Bottom two pictures are from the Vega Edge Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/868814363/vega-edge

To Sum Up…Have the base be something easy or make the full thing removable

Hold off building something permanent as long as possible

Don’t forget the battery packs or other bulky parts of your construction

Don’t procrastinate

PROGMEM for putting stuff in storage memory

Terrycloth to diffuse light

Thank you! http://gelicia.com/skirttalk/

https://github.com/gelicia/Skirt-LED

!

Kristina Durivage @gelicia

kdurivage@gelicia.com

picture by http://bdportraits.com/