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You can design, print and etch your own PCBs from a flexible sheet of Kapton coated with a thin layer of copper. To do this yourself you need some special materials and equipment, and if you are not planning on etching circuits more regularly then it can be nice to start by looking for a [...]

Saturday May 25th 11-18:00, Open Tech School workshop at Coop Berlin This workshop is more of a tutoring session for up to 3 participants and aims to be a super quick and basic introduction to programming an arduino lilypad, as well as personalized help building specific projects or getting started.

Thursday 9th May 2013, codemotion, Berlin arduino meets Wearables: What can your clothing do for you?

This project uses the Openwear open design for gLove Mono by Zoe Romano and integrates a felt & velostat bend sensor on the middle finger. A lilypad arduino is programmed to read the analog sensor value of the fabric bend sensor, and trigger 1, 2 or 3 LED lights to light up depending on how [...]

Also: poke sensor, pin prick sensor, prick sensor, sting sensor… Two layers of conductive fabric with isolating spacer in between.

The eTextiles Summer Camp 2013 Call for eTextiles Practitioners! The eTextiles Summer Camp (eTextile-summercamp.org) is a five day event that brings together expert practitioners of eTextiles and Soft Circuitry in one place to share their knowledge and skills through hands-on workshops, and facilitate discussions around their practices. We are looking for makers, designers, engineers and [...]

Every first Tuesday of the month, from 7pm onwards, at the Fablab-Berlin A monthly get-together for sharing, making and debugging all things eTextile related! Link >> http://www.fablab-berlin.org/de/e-textile-knitting-circle/

July/August/September 2013, Nadelwald, Berlin Workshop to be announced… In this workshop participants will sew a fashionable bike jacket with integrated blink signals.

Secret Garden Party: 25-28 July, Cambridgeshire Wilderness: 8-11 August, Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire Shambala: 22-25 August, Market Harborough, Leicestershire Workshops not yet confirmed. More info soon.

September/October/November 2013, Bratislava and Trencin, Slovakia To be confirmed >> http://col-me.info/

Conductive yarns are often in gray color which makes your project looks grayish. What if we color them in different colors so we can explore the aesthetic expression more freely, or match the conductive yarn color with the rest of the yarn to hide it completely? I have made a trial to dye the conductive [...]

EL panel and inverters are interesting material, but rather hard to control since it involves inverters with AC current. There are some nice tutorials on how to control AC side with triac or EL sequencer at sparkfun, buildr.. so on. But I always had a bit of problem when I want to fade them slowly, [...]

Saturday 13 April 2013, 1-6pm, Betahaus, Berlin Friday 26 April 2013, 11:30am-4pm, Betahaus, Berlin as part of the General Assembly Artisan Weekend This workshops combines textile crafts, new materials and electronics to build interactive fabrics. Participants will be introduced to a range of conductive fabrics and threads as well as a selection of electronic components [...]

This example uses an ATtiny microcontroller (programmed using arduino!) to playback a melody every time a head is laid on the pillow. The speaker is embroidered with conductive directly onto the surface of the pillow. A magnet is mounted directly behind the coil, inside the pillow is a knit pressure sensor that detects when a [...]

This little circuit sits nicely ontop of an arduino board and lets you quickly plug in an ATtiny chip for programming using the Arduino “language” and IDE to write the code, and the Arduino board as an ISP programmer to upload the code to the tiny chip.

Sunday 24 February 2013, 1-6pm, Betahaus Maker Weekend in Berlin, Germany This workshop is a good introduction to making soft circuits and writing some basic arduino code. Instead of learning how to program an Arduino, participants will learn to use an Arduino to program an ATtiny microcontroller, the difference being that the ATtiny microcontroller is [...]

An embroidered fabric speaker made into a pillow. Inside the pillow an amplification module hacked from a commercial device lets you easily connect your mp3 player to play back your favorite music. While the speaker might not be as loud as commercial speakers, you can very comfortably lay your head down on it to rest.

Still a work in progress…. Using an arduino or an ATtiny microcontroller to translate sound (from a microphone or an audio jack) into light patterns.

You can make a simpler heat controlling circuit using TIP122 transistor. The above image is the schematic. If you want to control a lot of heat lines, you can use shift register between arduino and input pin of TIP122. This method is not good if you turn on/off the heat in high frequency. TIP122 will [...]

Also see: conductive fabrics, conductive threads, thin flexible wire

This circuit uses the ATtiny 8-pin microcontroller which has 5 I/O pins to create a 7-segment display. Since a 7-segment display only requires control of 7 individual LEDs, we use 4 of the ATtiny I/O pins as charlieplexed outputs (n*(n-1)). Leaving the the fifth I/O pin to be used as digital or analog input or [...]

This post covers a few different (very basic) techniques for amplifying various sound sources. On the one hand sound coming from circuits inside toys that make sound (toy piano, singing greeting cards, recording and playback modules…), as well as sound made by generating frequencies using a microcontroller such as the ATtiny or an arduino board. [...]

This post is a summary that covers how to turn your arduino board into an ISP programmer and use it to program an ATtiny85 or 45 8-pin microcontroller.

November 23, 24 2012, at the V2 Sweatshop event in Rotterdam/The Netherlands Designing for the loop is a two-day workshop that focuses on eco-conscious eTextile design, developed by artists Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson in collaboration with sustainability expert Andreas Köhler. Participants debate issues of sustainability in eTextile design on the basis of several hands-on [...]

16, 17, 18 November 2012, Atelier Nord, Oslo/Norway Link >> http://ateliernord.no/en/workshop-soft-tiny-quiet-arduino-workshop/ Sign up >> http://ateliernord.no/pamelding-soft-tiny-quiet-arduino-workshop/ What are we missing? That we can’t buy in the store or online, that nobody has ever thought of because they don’t know our unique habits, strange abilities or eccentric desires?

Commercially available conductive fabrics are mostly evenly coated basic woven and knit structures. There is nothing fancy, distinct or particularity interesting about their aesthetic appeal. They are metallic, shiny and uniform. What if you could weave your own conductive fabrics. For one you could tailor the electrical properties of the fabric to your own designs, [...]

September 28th 2012 This workshop will be held as part of Catarina Mota’s Tech Crafts class at ITP in New York. Participants will embroider fabric speakers based on the following kit: >> http://www.etsy.com/listing/110290369/embroidered-speaker-kit

Programming integrated circuits with an ISP alligator clip extension.

Inspired by Marcelo Coehlo’s paper speaker and Vincent Leclerc’s Accouphene textile speaker, these paper and fabric speakers are made by running 5-9V sound amplified signal through a very conductive coil in close proximity to a magnet. Unlike most speakers that have the wire coil wrapped cylindrically and placed around the magnet, here the coil is [...]

Chris Palmer demonstrated how to pleat fabric using a technique of pre-stitching it together with thread. More about his work and technique, and the patterns for the folds are all documented in his book Shadow Folds.

An example using the lilypad arduino sewn to a pillow with a speaker and fabric tilt sensor, playing a different note for each petal of the sensor. The pillow also has an analog pin broken out to one of it’s corners to be connected to any external analog sensors to make noise.

When you need you conductors (wires) to be stretchy, one option is to crochet, knit or braid a conductive thread (or even a wire) alongside some elastic. Make sure to tension the elastic as you go so that ultimately the elastic bunches together the strand, allowing it to stretch a certain amount.

Using an embellishing machine to felt a black conductive felt (by Eeonyx) to a non-conductive felt.

A sensor that captures the movements of your pointing finger. Crochet from steel yarn that has stretch sensitive properties (electrical resistance decreases when steel fibers in the yarn are compressed through pressure or stretch)

Sunday August 26 2012, at the Shambala Festival in England, UK Electronic instruments, sonic soft-circuits, mechanical melodies…

July 28+29 2012, 10am – 5pm, MQ, Vienna/Austria Info and registration: office@mqw.at Location: Raum D, MuseumsQuartier

Wednesday June 13 2012, SF FASHION+TECH Wearable Tech & E-Textiles Meetup at TechShop San Francisco, USA Venue: TechShop SF, Conference Room, 926 Howard Street

Monday and Tuesday June 11th and 12th 2012, 11am – 5pm Adrian Freed and Hannah Perner-Wilson will be at CNMAT (UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) hanging out with paper folding experts (Monday) and messing around with electronic textiles, and other strange and interesting materials (Tuesday). Come join us for these days [...]

Date: MAY 17-18 Location: Post, Rotterdam The Netherlands, The workshop is a part of DEAF festival workshop leaders: Joris van Tubergen Florian Horsch Menno Van den Berg Brian Peters David Braam Mili John Tharakan Mika Satomi The workshop theme was to combine two different “crafting” techniques, 3D printing and Textile techniques, to come up with [...]

Using an ATtiny microcontroller to do capacitive sensing on the stem of the flower. When the flower is picked it’s petals slowly open to reveal a glowing inner light.

This post contains a collection of links, notes and references related to programming the ATtiny 45 & 84 chips using the arduino language.

Using Karl Grimm’s copper thread to sew solderable circuit traces to fabric. Karl Grimm’s copper thread is very much like wire, but much more flexible and it doesn’t quite look like wire. I haven’t had much luck using it as the bobbin thread in my sewing machine, but you can sew in place using regular [...]

Using nitinol wire (shape memory alloy) to make petal-shaped pieces of paper and fabric bend, fold, twitch and move.

PWM (“analog output”) on all five i/o pins of the ATtiny85 in software!

December 13th 2011 and January 3rd 2012, 5:30-8:30pm This workshop is not open to the public, but will be held as part of One Love Generation‘s mentoring sessions in Atlanta, GA. The aim of this workshop is to explore embroidery as a contemporary medium, in terms of both content and material. Participants will use conductive [...]

Using Sparkfun’s Bluetooth Modem – BlueSMiRF HID to interface between an arduino Pro Mini and a desktop Computer as an Human Interface Device (HID). The default mode of the BlueSMiRF HID is as a keyboard (which is very easy to set up), but you can also use it in HID raw mode (see user manual) [...]

Time: Feb 2nd – March 23rd, on Thursday 13-17, Friday 9-17 weekly Location: The Swedish School of Textiles, Borås, Sweden Lecturer: Mika Satomi The course is already finished. For details please visit the course website >> http://stdl.se/technology_textiles You can see each week’s tutorial under “Course Note“, and student’s final work under “Final Project” This is [...]

This fabric touchpad was inspired by the properties of piezoresistive materials to measure both amount of pressure applied through the materials and increase of resistance across distance. It is made by layering piezoresistive material between two conductive layers and using the piezoresistive layer to alternatively measure position and pressure.

December 5th and 12th, 5:30-8:30pm This workshop is not open to the public, but will be held as part of One Love Generation‘s mentoring sessions in Atlanta, GA. The aim of this workshop is to explore embroidery as a contemporary medium, in terms of both content and material. Participants will use conductive thread to embroider [...]

Thermochromic inks are pigments that change color to colorless at certain temperature. There are many different types of thermochromic pigments including textile inks for textile screen printing. Usually you mix normal textile pigments with thermochromic inks so that it looks like the ink is changing from one color to the other. For example, if you [...]

also see: collective purchase, conductive thread

This squeeze sensor can be made by knitting or crocheting a ball including resistive yarn. The ball can then be stuffed with different materials to achieve different kinds of squishiness. The ball can also be hand or machine felted, giving the surface a more uniform appearance.

also: Interweb, Bondaweb, Fusible, Interfacing, “iron-on“, Fusible web…

There are a range of different possibilities to connect conductive materials. One of the hardest and at this point very relevant one in textile electronics is the hard/soft connection between conductive textiles and traditional components and circuit boards. Most connections are a combination of permanent and plugable (de- and re- attachable) connections. Here we try [...]

If you want to include LED lights in your projects, one of the classic options used to be to wind the legs of a through-hole LED around the tip of a pair of needle-nose pliers, making rings that could then be sewn. Another option introduced by Leah Buechley, was to solder tiny metal crimp beads [...]

This seam-ripper has a continuity meter built in. An LED lights up to indicate when an unwanted electrical connection is made between the tip of the seam-ripper and the part of the circuit that you wish to disconnect from. An alligator clip can be connected to different parts of the circuit, so that you can [...]

This pincushion design has strips of conductive fabric adhered to its surface, so that metal pins or component contacts that protrude through the same piece of conductive fabric are electrically connected. This cushion can be used for prototyping electrical circuits as well as for string pins, needles and components.

This vibrating crochet hook can be used to measure the resistance of a crochet stretch sensor while it is being made. Continuity and resistance can be measured while the sensor is being crocheted. The vibration motor is powered by a 3V coin cell battery. The less resistance, the stronger the crochet needle will vibrate.

When you knit with conductive yarn, it changes the resistance when stretched. So, I thought of making an accelerometer with same principle. The weight at the end pulls and stretches the knitted structure as it gets accelerated. It works the best when this sensor (more of an object) is turned around like hammer throwing, or [...]

You can make a conductive felt with conductive wool. This method is used to make a conductive carpet for airplanes and other shielded place. I have used needle felting method to make a conductive pattern on felt. This conductive wool’s property is something similar to conductive yarn‘s. When you squeeze the ball of wool, the [...]

Conductive wool is perfect for felting. It is very fine conductive fibers (steel) mixed with normal wool, or with polyester. The one with wool works better for felting. I have purchased this from Bekaert Bekinox W12/18 Bekinox PES 12/50

Computer controlled textile machinery.

June 2 2011, 7pm, 3 hours, 15 participants, at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna/Austria If you have, PLEASE BRING: Knitting needles, crochet hook, multimeter, alligator clips, thread, yarn, fabric scraps and an arduino board as well as your laptop with Arduino and Processing software installed. WHERE: Museumsquartier, Tagr TV / Transforming Freedom Space WHO: women [...]

Conductive fabrics and threads can be plated without having to first coat them in conductive paint because they are already conductive! It can be a great way to make a conductive fabric solderable to then make a robust solder connection to a soft fabric circuit. Here are some examples of different conductive fabrics and threads [...]

We have made some EL panel and EL wire controlling experiment. The first experiment is with EL sequencer from Sparkfun. The picture below shows how things are connected. EL sequencer has ATMega chip on it with arduino bootloader. So, you can program it like arduino. (it is same as lilypad 328 setup) To connect it [...]

Copper plated traces are flexible and solderable. Start by painting with conductive paint directly onto the fabric where you want the copper to plate to. Then you’ll need to prepare the plating process. It takes only a few minutes to get a nice layer of copper. More information on the plating process can be found [...]

Here is the circuit schematics to control heating elements. I am using MOSFET as a digital switch to control on/off of the each heating element from arduino digital out pins. The project I developed this circuit for uses multiple heating lines, therefor I am pulsing it with 100ms each. OpAmp and transistors are there to [...]

Location: The Swedish School of Textiles, Boras Sweden Date: 8/12 Wednesday 10.30-16.30 9/12 Thursday 09.00-16.30 10/12 Friday 09.00-16.30 This workshop is for Textile Design 3rd year students to have a hands on experience on smart textiles and get familiar with basic electronics. We will modify a toy piano into a wearable instrument in this 3 [...]

27+28 November 2010, 14:30-18:00, Mostra Sesc de Artes, Sesc Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brazil max 15 participants The Wearable Sound Toy Orchestra is a workshop and a performance. No matter what your previous experience is with textiles and/or electronics, this workshop will teach you how to turn cheap electronic sound toys into wearable instruments.

Here is the documentation of my first experience on wet needle felting. My friend who does a lot of felting showed me how to do it. It seems that there are many ways to felt, so this is not the only way, but it works fine. Process We used felting wool (you can purchase it [...]

Here, I have crochet conductive yarn with felting yarn and felted it afterwards. It works great as pressure sensor. Making Here is the crochet piece before felting. I mixed Schoeller Nm 10/3 conductive yarn with hippy rainbow color felting yarn. Now it is time to felt. Place the crochet piece on the bowl. Pour hot [...]

There are some wool yarns that are made to felt after you knit or crochet. It is very easy to use and felt (wet it under hot water and cold water and rub with soap). You can mix conductive yarn to make various felted conductive project, or simply knit/felt it alone to make a nice [...]

When conductive yarn is knit/crochet into small pieces, it shows pressure sensitive property. I made granny squares, which middle gray part is made with conductive yarn thus pressure sensitive. Nine of the granny squares are assembled together like the typical granny blankets, which is actually a pressure sensitive button array. The assembled granny squares are [...]

Location: Kunstraum Walcheturm Kanonengasse 20 – 8004 Zürich Date: Nov 20 (Saturday) 10.00 – 17.00 Location: [plug.in] St. Alban-Rheinweg 64 – 4052 Basel Date: Nov 21 (Sunday) 10.00 – 17.00

When conductive yarn is mixed in the knit/crochet piece, it becomes pressure sensitive. This can be implemented as touch sensor or bend sensor.

I have recently ordered sparkfun conductive fabric (MedTex180), which is similar to LessEMF stretchy fabric but much thicker and stiffer. The structure of the fabric is more like a rib than Lycra. The front side is very shiny and you can see the rib structure from the back side. It stretches very well on once [...]

Here is the second version of Solar T-Shirt with components directly sewn on with conductive thread. It is also using slightly different circuit than the other solar t-shirt. The new schematic is the following. Please not that it is using FLED (Blinking LED) instead of diode on other one. In this example I used 2N3906 [...]

16+17th August 2010, DIS Conference, Aarhus, Denmark 9 participants, 2 days >> Workshop Website

This conductive fabric breakout circuit is also an example of a plugable hard to soft connection.

Use the Teensy board to fake Human Interface Device (HID) input. Human interface devices are recognized by your computer without need for drivers or custom software. They include computer mice, keyboards and joysticks. You can program the Teensy using arduino!!!

“Desoldering wick”! This is a very useful tool to desolder circuit when you make a mistake, or hacking toy circuits. I use them often but I never knew the name.. Here is the wikipedia explanation “A solder wick, also known as a desoldering wick or desoldering braid, is a roll of fine, braided 18 to [...]

Location: Himbeer Atelier, Linz, Austria Date: Aug 13th, 14th (13-17h) Aug 20th, 21st (13-17h) Aug 27th(13-17h) In this series of workshops, you will be introduced to conductive textile materials and ways to use them. There will be a small introduction to microcontroller programming and beginner electronics. The aim of the workshop is to get familiar [...]

By using high-resistance conductive thread instead of conductive fabric, you can make a slider (potentiometer) with zippers. Unlike zipper switch, this sensor gives analog values instead of “ON/OFF”.

A Zipper is a great clothing material that can be converted into sensors. Zipper switch is a known technique used in many projects like TV-B-Gone-Hoodie by Becky Stern. It is also introduced in “Fashioning Technology” book by Syuzi Pakhchyan.

DJ Hoodie is a wearable interface that includes 4 channel zipper switch, fabric buttons with LED indicators and fabric pressure sensors. Two of these hoodies are connected with knitted stretch sensors on the hoods. It interfaces with computer with arduino using Firmata library and Pduino.

Conductive and non-conductive play-doh recipes by Dr. AnnMarie Thomas and Samuel Johnson.

Tips on how to improve your electrical contacts between various materials. It is always good practice to test a certain connecting technique before applying it to more than one connection.

This “paper” yarn from Habu is made from 100% linen! It is amazingly strong and soft to work with and looks beautiful.

Use Vaseline as a resist and a bath of salt and vinegar to etch away the copper from copper fabric to make circuits and sensors.

Using the Sparkfun uLog module to log three channels of data and then read it out and graph it in Processing.

This example shows how to construct a “textile” flexible tilt sensor from extremely cheap and available materials. Substituting conductive fabric and a metal bead for aluminum foil.

Aluminum foil used with fusible interfacing is a great inexpensive and super available substitute for conductive fabrics.

Flexible circuits can be made from a variety of flexible conductive materials on various substrates. The conductors can be printed, painted, cut&pasted, adhered and fused…

Location: Interface Cultures, Kunstuniversitat Linz, Austria Time: 31th May,1st, 2nd June, 2010, 10-17h This workshop introduces interaction and physical interface design topics through hans-on projects.

This is a combination of conductive pompom and tilt sensor. The advantage is that the pompom has much bigger and softer surface than metal bead, which helps for it to touch the tilt detecting conductive fabric. Also it gives a certain look, that may be desired for some projects.

While pompom makers are convenient tools for making pompoms in all different sizes, you can also make your own tool from cardboard.

also see: conductive pompom, pompom tool Make pressure sensor ball by felting a pompom composed of wool and conductive steel fibers.

Dan Riley (www.scisci.org) made a beautiful Fabric Ribbon cable. 8 separate lines of conductive threads are woven into the fabric. The end of the cable is connected to normal 16 pin plug as normal ribbon cable.

Location: LIWOLI 10, Kunstuniversitat Linz, Austria Time: 15th April, 2010, 11-17h

Dino-Lite digital USB microscope AM-311S Handheld Microscope 0.3M / Resolution 640×480 USB 2.0 Output 0X~50x, 200x Magnification Built-in 8 white LED’s 185$