Circuits

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

By using light sensor with transistor switch, you can make a “LED that turns on when dark” circuit without bothering with microcontrollers.

This circuit was inspired by the Overheadbots. The circuit harvests the energy from a 0,5V 100mA solar cell, storing it in capacitors and then releasing it to drive a motor. This circuit was used in the Solar T-Shirt example project.

arduino >> http://www.arduino.cc/ USB : Diecimila   “The Arduino Diecimila is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega168 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to [...]

By now there are a range of both commercially available sewable circuits. But there is also a nice range of people’se personal one-off sewable circuit designs.

The following CNMAT and Wikipedia entries cover all the important explanations of why you need and how to place pull-up or pull-down resistors.

Often, we experienced “Why it does not work?!” moment, because simply connection was not good, or power was not enough. It sounds simple, but if you are using conductive fabric or thread as connection, it happens time to time. so, we made a xbee shield (PCB) that can snap into lilypad‘s header pin so that [...]

The circuits found inside cheap electronic toys, especially sound toys, can become very useful when you want small circuits. You can not customize them as much as planning and programming your own, but these come cheap, quick and easy to cut down to a bare minimum and embed in a garment.

Used in Puppeteer motion-capture costume.