Circuits

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 support the microcontroller; [...]

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.

I had hard time soldering DIP pin legs to conductive fabric. It becomes always crumbly and does not stick to the fabric good. (Also I am using lead free solder, that makes it look crumbly too)

By using Vinyl Cutter , you can cut a copper foil into circuit trace shape and make a soft circuit. There are some nice post from Simon de Bakker and Nadya Peek showing how to make a vinyl cut circuit. Since I had an access to Roland CAMM 1 GX-24E vinyl cutter, I’ve made my own. The [...]

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 at [...]

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.

Roland MDX-40
With engraving drilling head, you can produce your own PCB. It can not make copper lines thinner than 1.6mm, but enough for DIP circuits. Great thing is that you can skip the messy etching process.

Fabric PCB’s are flexible, washable (hopefully) and sewable, even with sewing machines. The method we used is basically following the fabric PCB from Leah Buechley. You need a laser cutter to do this method, since the cut pieces are quite small and needs to be accurate. It will be quite difficult to cut this by [...]

You can print your own PCB and etch it without needing special equipment. Syuzi Pakhchyan has a very nice tutorial for DIY circuit printing on diynetwork.com 

Used in Puppeteer motion-capture costume.