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    Content by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson


    Hannah is currently a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab's
    High-Low Tech research group


    Supported by Distance Lab
    Sensors

    Fabric Stretch Sensors

    Creating stretch sensors from stretchy fabrics that have conductive/resistive properties that change depending on the stretching of the fabric. I’m hoping this will allow to make super simple stretch sensors and lead to other interesting possibilities.

    So far we have tested a range of Eeonyx stretchy fabrics that are coated in doped polypyrrole, an inherently conducting polymer. The first results are interesting, but we have yet to test these in a specific situation.


    In this video I am testing four different stretch conductive fabrics from Eeonyx. Numbers 1, 2, 3 and 9 based on the total number of ten that they sent me. You can see details in the photo of the chart bellow.

    4 Comments so far

    1. [...] Homemade bend sensor Homemade Fabric/Stretch Sensor Electroluminescent “wire” (EL-wire) (4.95 $) Alcohol sensor (4.50$) Solenoid (1.42 $) Linear [...]

    2. ramyah on July 23rd, 2010

      hey,
      I ordered some conductive fabrics last week and have been trying a few things too..your experiments are really nice.
      Could you tell more about the circuit to the micro-controller.(for e.g circuit schematic)
      Thanks A lot!

    3. admin on July 23rd, 2010

      I connected the fabrics to the analog to digital converter pin of an Arduino board. In most cases the (10-20K) pull-up resistors worked well but sometimes i got better results by using external 5K or over 100K pull-ups. To smooth the readings you can add a low-pass filter, which you would do by placing a 4.7 to 10 uF capacitor in parallel to the pull-up resistor (from analog input to VCC).
      Hope this helps!

    4. ramyah on July 24th, 2010

      yep, thanks a ton :) though my circuit is still quite noisy,I managed to get some results. I am working with a small sample of electrolycra in which the resistance change is very little for which i had to also use an Opamp.
      Overall, i think this is a good start :) thanks again!

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