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 thrown.
Here, I am using marbles as weights and bead to isolate the conductive thread connection from the bottom.
Simple testing device. Connected with lilypad and xbee, powered with Lipo battery.
Reading the sensor data from processing sketch. This is a modification of a “graph” sketch. It is showing the input difference.
3 Comments so far
Very cool. Am interesting and engaging project…esp for female engineering students.
[...] different kinds of sensors could be found here. (some of the wireless may cost around 100 pounds for each sensor) Kai Share [...]
Why does it need to be “especially” for females? The only thing it seems especially suited to is wearable electronics, but it seems like a clever a cost-effective way of building sensors for embedded projects in general. I’m male and I’m actually planning on using these ideas for my projects too. The only reason that engineers have a 90/10 gender split is because of stereotypes, ya know…