From Mobile March 2014-Learn how Kristina added electronics to items she can wear. She’ll cover some of the issues I ran into that are specific to building wearable technology and how I solved them.

1. Building
Wearables
Kristina Durivage
@gelicia

2. Soft
Circuits
Top: Hearts A Glow, Embroidery + LED!
By Lynne Bruning !
http://www.instructables.com/id/Hearts-AGlow/ !
!
Bottom: Turn Signal Biking Jacket!
By Leah Buechley!
http://www.instructables.com/id/turn-signal-biking-jacket/

3. Conductive thread
Quality is sketchy, buy from a good source!
Sewn in components
Either modified normal components or special ones
Special Arduino
SparkFun has the Lilypad line
Adafruit has the FLORA line
Top: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1260 Middle: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9266 Bottom: http://lilypadarduino.org/?p=1483

4. Soft Circuits

5. Challenge becomes how to add on non e-textile
components to clothing
Get a wider variety of components to choose from
Removable == washable

6. EL Wire Skirt

7. Do not think of your battery pack last!
They’re heavy, cumbersome, and necessary!
They might make dancing hard! The horror!!
Lesson Learned

8. LED Array v1

11. Lessons Learned?
Don’t procrastinate!
Programming for the Arduino is harder than
what I’m used to - start early
PROGMEM is your friend
LEDs do not work like they do in your
imagination!

12. LED Array v2 & v3

13. Goals
As flexible and durable as possible
Use less pins - more pins for other things
Easy to program
Cheaper

14. Step 1
Step 2
Step 3

15. Step 4

16. Step 5

18. Programming

19. LED is individually addressable
Program translates (x,y) to an
address
Color - reference with one number
between 1-384 instead of RGB

20. Display image
Scroll image
Scroll and alternate image

21. Tetris!

22. Joystick breakout board
from Adafruit
Integrated with a flexible
wire into the sash
Joystick sticks out of
fabric (but this actually
doesn’t work so well)

23. Sewing

25. Circle Skirts!
Measure your waist
Math yourself up a radius
Draw a donut in the fabric
Cut out the donut
Add elastic on one side
Hem the other
Voila!
These pictures and a full tutorial are from
http://whatthecraft.com/circle-skirt-tutorial-new-and-improved/

26. Lessons Learned
Find a good, simple base project
Something easy
Something that can be replicated
Something that can be modified easily
Don’t forget power! (remember that one?)
Removable components are a lot easier
Terrycloth diffuses LED light!
Bottom two pictures are from the Vega Edge Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/868814363/vega-edge

27. To Sum Up…
Have the base be something easy or make the full thing
removable
Hold off building something permanent as long as possible
Don’t forget the battery packs or other bulky parts of your
construction
Don’t procrastinate
PROGMEM for putting stuff in storage memory
Terrycloth to diffuse light

28. Thank you!
http://gelicia.com/skirttalk/
https://github.com/gelicia/Skirt-LED
!
Kristina Durivage
@gelicia
kdurivage@gelicia.com
picture by http://bdportraits.com/