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When using microcontroller for embroidery circuit projects, sometimes you do not want to directly solder them on the embroidery as you need to take it out to change the program on it. For this, sockets are convenient, but it is also bulky on the fabric. I used 5mm felt, that is as thick as the […]

(German version bellow) Stories from an e-textile tailor Make your tech and wear it too! In this talk I’d like to give an introduction to the materials, tools, skills and energies involved in making electronic textiles and tailoring wearable technology, which has been my practice for the past 13 years. I spend my days crafting […]

In this post I want to try and explain how a pressure matrix built from conductive rows and columns with a piezoresistive material (Eeonyx, velostat) in between works, how to wire it up to an arduino and write the Arduino code that will parse through the rows and columns to read the individual pressure points […]

11 December 2019, 15-18:00 at TH Nürnberg, Germany A hands-on exercise in re-imagining techniques for making electronics that are integrated in different kinds of material and craft processes. Links: >> A Kit-of-No-Parts at Weissensee (2014)

An attempt to combine three iconic illustrations of ohm’s law into one: annotated in german (english coming soon): ORIGINALS: the best: forrest m. mims Getting Started in Electronics >> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5jcnBPSPWQyaTU1OW5NbVJQNW8/edit the water analogy:

Copper of thread, pigment of change…..

All from one circle….

A simple LED circuits with an interrupted connection that can be worn as a bracelet.

A collection of simple circuits (power, actuator) that are missing a part of their connection. Intended for visualizing the effects that variable resistive sensors have on the amount of voltage that reaches the actuator.

Three techniques for mounting LEDS on top of buttons. 1 sew buttons with a solderable conductive thread and solder LEDs afterwards to the thread. 2 prepare button with copper tape and solder LED first and then sew to make contact to the copper tape pads. 3 same as 2 but mount LED underneath button facing […]

October 2019 – January 2020, a course in the department of Gestaltung: Technik-Textil at the Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria This course is only open to students of Gestaltung: Technik-Textil. This course pursues an exploratory approach to introducing electronic textiles (E-Textiles) as a material practice. Taking the analogy of an expedition, students will depart on a journey […]

A little goes a long way. Stainless steel fibers blended with wool roving and spun and plied on on a drop-spindle. Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157711023086991 This is not a recipe but an attempt to share things to think about when you approach spinning your own conductive yarn. Or “sensor” yarn in the sense that it’s electrical conductivity […]

Hydrogen Peroxide Etching conductive fabric Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157710980633483 copper riptstop: silver lycra (front): silver lycra (back): silver lycra (stretched): materials: High acidity vinegar (24%): look in the cleaning section of your local supermarket for vinegars used in cleaning. Hydrogen Peroxide (Wasserstoffperoxid Lösung) 30%: ask at your local pharmacy and let them know you are using it […]

Together with Maurin we have been wondering what exactly goes on inside a piezoresistive material – or where the piezoresistive effect takes place. >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoresistive_effect Ideas for why/where changes in resistance are happening by Maurin Donneaud: The information I bring here comes from my intuitions that I have not yet had the time to confirm […]

A pressure sensor made with conductive wool. You can mix a bit of wool to increase the range of resistance change.

Three robots encased in clear tupperware as an easy means of experiencing how textile sensors can be used to control textile actuators (well the LED BOT is not really a textile actuator – but could use fibrous stuffing to diffuse the light!) Textile LED Bot Textile Servo Bot Textile Speaker Bot Textile LED Bot Textile […]

Instead of soldering the LED to the tip of the Lulu BEE you could solder the ends of 4-wires to the pads on the PCB. Thus the Lulu becomes a 4-way e-textile to wire adapter… connector… breakout…

A lengthy pin potentiometer. Something like a slug on the back of your hand. Filled with polenta. You poke the sharp pin through layers of conductive fabrics (and the polenta), one is highly conductive the other has lots of resistance. The pin is conductive and makes an electrical connection from the conductive wiper layer to […]

A part of textiles summer school at DLAB KIT Kyoto Japan. August 19 – 30, 2019 Textiles stand at the forefront of material technology offering a staggering range of characteristics for designers to exploit: touch, fold, stretch, stroke, squeeze, scrub, etc. We manipulate textile surfaces that surround us in various ways. By embedding e-textile materials […]

ccc camp 2019 Extend your CARD10 wristband out into the world….. of etextiles! friday, 22-8-19, 19:00-20:30 in the CARD10 village saturday, 23-8-19, 18:30-20:00 in the CARD10 village >> https://card10.badge.events.ccc.de/en/workshops/ bring (if you have): – your CARD10, USB-C cable, laptop – “normal” LEDs – scissors – pliers – sewing needles step-by-step: More photos: https://flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157710505658161 STAGE 1: […]

8-9 November 2019, Queen Mary University of London Artists, technologists and makers are invited to take part in a hackathon around the themes of absurd musical interfaces, questionable sonic interactions and unworkable music designs. Does this sound fun to you? Please, join us! Application Deadline: 8 September 2019 >> http://instrumentslab.org/research/absurd-music-design.html

August 29 & 30 2019, 10-16:00, TU Berlin From Robots that Craft, to Crafting Robots Examining technology through a material lens — a means of looking inside the machine by way of remaking its component parts — in order to spin new robot stories. This workshop was invited by Pat Treusch of „Träumen Roboter vom […]

Stories from an e-textile tailor Presentation at the CCC Camp 2019, 2019-08-21 16:00 In this talk i’d like to give an introduction to the materials, tools, skills and energies involved in making electronic textiles and tailoring wearable technology, which has been my practice for the past 13 years. I spend my days crafting electronic textiles, […]

Recently I have noticed bart and francis has merino wool / inox conductive yarn. (https://www.bart-francis.be/index.php?item=–150-meter_cone&action=article&group_id=128&aid=4531&lang=EN) This sounds really interesting! I have ordered it immediately, and just have got the package. Here is the first try out of the measurement and comparison to the plug and wear conductive yarn. The spec of the yarn is “82% […]

Instead of treating each conductive petal contact of the this fabric tilt sensor as an individual digital input, the petals are connected through a resistive fabric ring. The end petals in this “resistor ladder” connectto GND and VCC to create a voltage divider (just like inside a potentiometer) and the bead makes for a voltage […]

June 9-15, 2019 at Shakerag in Sewanee Tennessee/USA Electricity does not have to be cased up inside slick metal enclosures; we can also let it flow through painted pine-cones, carved traces, and the water in our bodies. The segregation of our abilities into discrete disciplines leaves gray areas to be explored and missing links to […]

The second part of the course is about exploring the SMA (shape memory alloy) and textile. We will go over how to train the SMA, how to connect them and how you can trigger them with electricity. We will also connect the SMA samples to Arduino and control the activation with it. The first SMA […]

Three etextile related workshops at ITP camp: Wear your tools! https://itp.nyu.edu/camp2019/session/41 Make a Fabric Touchpad https://itp.nyu.edu/camp2019/session/40 Multitouch Paper Recognizing Gestures (with vvvv) PART 1&2 https://itp.nyu.edu/camp2019/session/3

Sunday May 19th 11-16:00 (4h) at KOBAKANT New Studio (Schönwalder Strasse 23, Wedding/Berlin) Our fingers are constantly swiping across touchpads, to enter passwords, navigate maps, play games, type messages. But how does this work? How are our physical interactions with materials sensed and translated into electronic signals that our computers can understand? In this workshop […]

10 x 10 matrix: Photos >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157680387415118 TinyTextileTouchpad 7×7 rSkin Matrix rSkin – Open Source Robot Skin

Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157708415706295 5 x 5 3 x 3

Over the years, we’ve designed and built a variety of small compact circuits that translate electrical resistance into something we can perceive like: light, sound, vibration. This post intents to pull together all these different items in one place. To see if there are insights I’d forgotten about as well as a pool of inspiration […]

April 18 2019, 11-17:00, Junge Tüftler, Berlin // This workshop is only open to Junge Tüftler MitarbeiterInnen. Adventuring with Materials – a proposal for getting lost and coming home by Hannah Perner-Wilson Building electronics have become very much a learning about the functionality of electronic components, and not an experiencing of the electrical properties of […]

This is an example project/ experiment to use Bela board with e-Textile sensors. Here, I am making crochet blanket with exposed conductive pieces so one can use their skin resistance to “play” music by touching different part of the blanket. The blanket was originally made for a small workshop, and it was connected to Teensy […]

Electronic Textile is a technique that uses metalized or carbon infused thread and fabric to create electronics. You can knit sensors and embroider speakers. In this workshop, you will be introduced how to crochet a touch sensor with conductive threads. The finished crochet sensor will be connected as one big crochet blanket that plays back […]

Swatches that showcase some of the things you can do with the Lulu Daisy – a design solution to connecting e-textiles, LEDs and optic-fibers. – 3 swatches – 6 mini crocodile clips – 1 breadboard with Teensy and crocodile clip connections for (+3V, GND, Data) demo code: cycles through one swatch at a time. was […]

We’ve been working on the Lulu (a design solution to connecting e-textiles, LEDs and optic-fibers) for some time now, and spent a lot of time looking at how we can mount LEDs at a right angle on PCBs and couple the LED with the end of the optic-fiber, but what we have not spent much […]

February 11-15 2019, taught by Paula Te and Hannah Perner-Wilson at the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design in Copenhagen, Denmark

Photos >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157705181925511

When we think of what is unusual and unusual in our lives, how do we draw the boundaries that define these categories? The idea of preparing a presentation on “UNusual E-Textile Techniques” appealed to me maybe because I feel much of what made e-textiles attractive to me at the start (12 years ago in 2006) […]

January 21-25 2019, KOBA in Berlin, Germany We have been running our KOBA E-Textile Tailorshop for one year now. During this time we’ve been refining our skills in some of the most basic techniques like making hard-soft connections and detachable parts. But we have also been confronted with learning bespoke tailoring skills in taking a […]

Lulu is a hardware solution that interfaces between an LED light source, an optic fiber strand or bundle, and sewable soft circuit connections. The Lulu provides a toolset for using side glow optical fibers in your eTextile and wearable projects. Use of light in textile and fashion design is becoming more and more common as […]

January 2018, hosted jointly by Interface Cultures and Fashion and Technology departments at the Art University Linz, Austria * * * This workshop is only open to Art University Linz students. Students should only sign up for this course if they can commit to attending the full schedule (see bellow). * * * For the […]

A simple pressure sensor matrix made from two Kapton film sheets with 7×7 copper tape traces and a piece of velostat or Eeonyx piezoresistive material in between.

A snap connection not only makes for a robust e-textile electrical connector, it also make for a great pivot point. When you have a single electrical connection to make the snap can double as both electrical connection and pivot point. But what when you have more than one electrical connection?

For the Lulu

Sick of LEDs shining directly in your eyes? We are too! This design has the LEDs mounted inside the curves of this serpentine strip so that the LED faces down towards the the fabric and what you see is the light reflected off the surface of the fabric.

Nov 29,30,Dec 4,9,2018 10:00- 17:00 elab Weissensee Art Academy Berlin. Assignment The next 2 days will be something like mini hackathon. It is time for you to explore what these textile sensors can do as interface and think about different types of interaction with digital technology. For this, we give ourselves a framework/story. Inspired by […]

We very kindly received samples of this elastic conductive thread made with Statex conductive thread from Filix in France. We have not had time to use/test them for anything yet, but will post about it here as soon as we do. SC 4194 ECRU NF CC LY800 DC SS35µ+Cu40-PA2/78/68 Core : LYCRA 800 DTEX Cover […]

swing, sway, wave, trail, quiver, quake, judder, jiggle, jig, joggle, jog, jerk, waggle, wiggle, wriggle, wobble, shake, shiver, shudder, squirm, slant, lean, tip, slope, incline, dip, angle, twitch, totter, teeter, tremble, rock, roll, flutter, flap, vibrate, oscillate, convulse …work in progress… This beaded sway sensor was designed to capture the swinging, swaying, jerking, tilting movements […]

Build a simple circuit with an LED, a coin-cell battery pouch and interrupt the full circuit connection by inserting two crocodile clips. When the clips connect, the circuit is complete and the LED light will shine. When you mount a textile sensor between the clips, the LED brightness will depend on the resistance of the […]

A metal clothing button and a button hole that works as state switch. When it is fastened, the connection is made, and if you open the button, the connection gets broken. *This sensor is inspired by the Swatch exchange sample “Button Switch” by Ricardo O’Nascimento Step by Step Cut a hole on the fabric. Make […]

See also Button Button >> http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=7328

Surely a button Is self-explanatory And yet causes stress (haiku from Kate Fletcher’s Craft of Use, p20) This post covers a few different ways you can construct your own electrical “pushbutton” or embed a ready-made mechanical pushbutton (also known as momentary switch) into a textile button. What is nice about the mecanical mechanism is that […]

October 24-26 2018, 17-20:30 (10h), at ČIPke in Ljubljana, Slovenia

You can make your own mini-breadboards by cutting up a larger one. Flickr set >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/sets/72157672660416318 Peel back the stick and remove the metal from the rows you will cut: Cut: Replace the sticky: Five mini breadboard from one long one:

August 20-25 2018, KOBA in Berlin, Germany INTRODUCTION For the last 6 months KOBAKANT have been running KOBA, a tailorshop for electronic textiles and wearable technology in Berlin, Germany. The KOBA School of Wickedfabrics is intended as a time and place for us to formalize our tailoring process and share this experiance with you. This […]

“arduino is an open source computer hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control objects in the physical and digital world.” (wikipedia>>) Arduino website >> https://www.arduino.cc/ in this workshop, we use Flora, which is […]

Textile Sensors One can make different types of sensors. Some sensors have two states, “on” or “off”, or another words, “contact” or “no contact” like on/off switches of a light. Other sensors have range of states, like a dimmer of a light. The two state kind of sensors are digital sensors, and the sensors that […]

August 6-11, 2018 at KOBA Explore the Material collect samples and make a page for your swatch book. Please check: How much resistance? What are the characteristics? (physical/ electrical) Does it change its conductivity? if so how, what is the changing range? Multimeter We can not see the electrons flowing. So we can not tell […]

Time: May 16,18 2018 10:00- 17:00 (15:00 on 16th) Time: May 30, June 1 2018 10:00- 17:00 Location: eLab, Weissensee Art Academy Berlin This workshop is only open to KHB students This is a series of 4 workshops to learn how one can move textile surface with electricity. In the first workshop, participants will learn […]

For the KOBA Prescilla commission we used this solution for making our own “Lulu” e-textile to LED to optic-fiber solution.

For the last 6 months KOBAKANT have been running KOBA, e-textile tailorshop in Berlin, Germany. During this time we’ve been refining our skills in some of the most basic techniques like making hard-soft connections and detachable parts. But we have also been confronted with learning bespoke tailoring skills in taking a customer’s ideas from concept […]

Many self-made datagloves I see on the Internet have been made by re-purposing existing gloves. While this is a wonderful “hack” and solution, I also wanted to add to this possibility that of tailoring your own gloves to a specific set of hands. The following instructions explain how to measure your hand, what measurements to […]

A modular system for prototyping the exact placement of sensors, to be able to use/try/test them before finalizing where they go! Nadja Kutz has been developing all kinds of ideas for making herself datagloves (and senor-wear) to allow her to interact with her computer in alternate (more healthy) ways. One nice quick&cheap solutions she has […]

A dataglove made from piezoresistive fabric with safetey pin connectors that can be pinned to different parts of the glove to capture stretch in different areas. Links: E-Textile Dataglove Overview: http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=6730 Dataglove Overview: http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=7114 Flickr set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157679861886694/ Using the snap diamond breakout board design >> http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=6703

Inspired by this upcoming workshop during E-Textile Spring Break titled “Body to Body: RFID + PAN Workshop, where Ingo + Nicole will “…introduce a DIY implementation of these systems to pass data through bodies to other bodies”. To make the connection between the body and the breadboard, this bracelet has conductive fabric on the back/bottom […]

This connector makes the connection between a piece of 1,5mm diameter sideglow fiber optic and an SMD Neopixel (controllable RGB LED). The four connections from the LED are broken out to rings on a tube which holds the LED on one end and holds the fiber optic from the other end. Thanks to Ben for […]

EMF (Electro Magnetic Field) is all around us, but we do not see or hear them. By amplifying it with EMF amplifier, you can listen to them. Many artists work with EMF amplifiers in their artistic expressions. One can also use E-Textile techniques to make soft textile antennas and create wearable EMF listeners. In E-Textile […]

In order to create our own version of a “Northbelt” built into the elastic of a jumpsuit waistband, we developed a technique for laying out the circuit’s traces along the length of the elastic, and then jumping inside to tight-fitting pouches that fit vibration motors mounted on 2x5cm boards. The traces from the circuit run […]

After tearing apart some classic and novel datagloves, I realized it would be so simple to layout and produce a version of these multiple flex sensor rigs using a vinylcutter, some Kapton film and tape, copper tape sheets and velostat – to make an extended version of this stickytape sensor design.

When making eTextile circuit, the solder joint between hard component and conductive textile material tend to break as it get the most strain from flexing. To avoid this, the whole circuit can be placed on a fabric button so that it does not get bent. Here is the test LED embroidery circuit on a fabric […]

Based on the idea of this Common GND breadboard (electronic components) to snap (textile) connector, I wanted to think-through the work-flow of using such a breakout board that would allow me to prototype both circuit and wearable, with iterations and testing in between, without always re-designing how the two are connected.

Analyzing what it means to make a “soft circuit”, which today still means combining a mix of soft and hard components.

As part of thinking about robustness and durability in our e-textile tailor shop, I’m revisiting some of the ways we’ve been making permanent and detachable connections between hard and soft components of e-textile circuits.

A collection of different ways to store coin-cell batteries (CR2032). One picture per method, with links to further documentation where available.

New manufacturers and distributors are always popping up and disappearing again. In this post we try to list some of our most used e-textile materials and where we purchase. Since we are based in Berlin/Germany we try to order as much as possible from local manufacturers and distributors/redistributors. We even started a list of super […]

E-Textiles + Jugend Hackt = Interactive Alpaca T-Shirt

Stereo audio jack socket: USB power: Upgrade: JST LiPo:

“ohne mich” (engl. “without me”) Interactive Fiber-Optic Poetry in Motion For the opening collection of our KOBA Maßschneiderei – an E-Textile Tailor Shop we are opening in Berlin very soon – we are prototyping the items in this collection. One of these is fiber-optic poetry, two words embroidered in fiber-optics cables, but overlaid so that […]

Using beads to insulate multiple conductive threads next to one another coming from an e-textile circuit, ending in male header pins.

Sewing Karl-Grimm copper conductive thread as bottom bobbin thread in sewing machine and soldering cut up pieces from a Neopixel strip to these lines to have custom placement and spacing.

14-17th November 2017 hosted jointly by Interface Cultures and Fashion and Technology departments at the Art University Linz, Austria * * * This workshop is only open to Art University Linz students. Students should only sign up for this course if they can commit to attending the full schedule (see bellow). * * * >> […]

Week 5 on the 21st of October 2017 as part of the Fabricademy As part of the Fabricademy we will teach one of the week sessions introducing electronics textiles as a field of making soft, flexible, wearable electronics. Students will learn techniques by copying swatches as well as producing their own unique designs. In this […]

This credit-card size flex circuit translates the resistance between two probes into the resistor colour code. Conveniently the resistor colour code chart can be mounted just bellow the LEDs so that you don’t actually have to remember it for this tool to be useful. This version is a first prototype and with through-hole components not […]

Made during PIFcamp 2017, this textile sensor detects the impact of a conductive pendulum slapping against the wristband when the wrist is twisted back and forth in a flicking action. The conductive pendulum is made from a small heavy stone collected by the Soca river that has been sewn into a stretch conductive pouch.

These Sonic Insoles demonstrate a simple way of adding pressure sensors in your shoes. Fusing strips of conductive fabric to the surface of a robust base material such as felt. Cutting shapes of piezoresistive fabric for the pressure sensitive areas. Punching holes for sewing and using thick thread to hold everything together.

in progress… Inspired by Vaclav’s Magic Shoe connections… Poke wires through strips of conductive fabric and soldered them to stripy protoboard. Solder quickly at low heat to avoid that the heat of the soldering will melt the stretch conductive fabric and burn the conductive layer of silver.

These textile sensor demos were made for the Soft Circuits for Soft Bodies workshop at the eTextile Summer School 2017.

— work in progress — Making electrical connections and not making electrical connections are the most common challenges when working with electronic textiles. This chart lists a variety of materials and ways of making connections (making contact) and not making connections (insulating) between them.

This wearable tool translates resistance into colour and sound.

Breadboard to Metal Snap Converter The worlds of electronics and textiles are separated by their inability to connect across shared connections. But in the world of electronic textiles you want to be able to share power, data, GND. To bridge this gap, and make electrical connections between these separated worlds, I made this breadboard to […]

30th July – 5th August 2017, at PIFcamp in Slovenia. KOBAKANT will be joining PIFcamp this year to design and build “all-natural wearable technology”. Merging natural and technical materials and mechanisms to produce a new style of technological cladding – wearables to protect us from the future.

22 – 23 July 2017, at Les Moulins de Paillard in Poncé-sur-le-Loir, France eTextile Summer Fest is a weekend long event that is open to everyone who would like to join. The event will be held at the Paillard Centre d’Art Contemporain & Résidence d’Artistes, Poncé sur le Loir, France. If you are curious to […]

Interactive Improvisational Perfomance of Calligraphy, movement and sound Time: June 4th 2017 17:00- Location: the Apartment Project Berlin (Hetzbergstrasse 13, 12055 Berlin) http://berlin.apartmentproject.org/ Aoi Yamaguchi (Japanese Calligraphy) > http://aoiyamaguchi.com/ Schneider TM (Experimental Music) > http://schneidertm.net/ Ozgur Erkok (Performance) > http://ozgurerkok.blogspot.de/ Mika Satomi (Sensor embedded costume and Interactive system) > http://www.kobakant.at/ Aoi, Schneider TM and Mika […]

As I got a new stretchy fusible/heat bond from Bemis, I started to experiment with bonding fabrics with iron. Making bend sensor with this technique is super quick, super easy and works very very well as a sensor. Rachel Freire has been working a lot with the heat bond and eTextiles as second skin project […]

The following is a collection of Datagloves made using electrically conductive fabrics that react to strain (stretch, pressure) with a change in electrical resistance (piezoresistive effect), allowing them to sense the movement of the fingers. Connections are made from these fabrics to classic electrical wires and circuitboards, so that a microcontroller can translate these analog […]

June 26th – 29th during the NODE Festival in Frankfurt, Germany Not a workshop, but a participatory performance. The VVunsch VVerkstatt is an installation/intervention that deals with making wishes come true. Throughout the NODE festival the VVunsch VVerkstatt will provide a place for discussing the role of technology as a tool for making wishes come […]

Time: May 19,20 2017 10:00- 17:00 as a part of Weissensee Art Academy Berlin, Soft Interactive Technology 2 course Location: Print Lab and eLab, Weissensee Art Academy Berlin In this second part of the Soft Interactive Technology 2 course, we will have 2 days of experimenting with thermochromic screen printing on textile and designing the […]

Wednesday 10th May 2017, 17:30 – 19:30 at the Toronto Wearables Meetup at the Social Body Lab at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Pins are sharp and familiar, abundant and conductive. Used in textiles as tools for prototyping, to make quick connections between materials. Lets examine these pins closer, treat them as materials themselves and […]