NEW PRODUCT – Conductive Fiber – Stainless Steel 20um – 10 grams -This conductive fiber is super interesting! It’s great for felting and could also be spun into yarn if that’s your thing. We tested many different fiber thicknesses for needle felting and found that this one (20um fiber thickness) is the most pleasurable to work with. Use about 0.2g of the stuff to make a felt touch button suitable for use with the MaKey MaKey or capacitive touch sensing circuit. Make felt controllers or felt buttons onto an existing wool sweater!
You can also make a squeeze/pressure sensor with this fiber, as it becomes less resistive the more you squeeze the fibers together. Make sure to combine this fiber with a natural animal fiber (which have “scales”) for best results. We think 10g is the perfect amount and will get you through several projects.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: The latest on Raspberry Pi RP2350-E9, Bluetooth 6, 4,000 Stars and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
Knitting with conductive fibers is great for making stretch sensors, as the resistance will drop when the fibers are pulled into contact. So, I guess you could make gloves, but you’d have to have some careful placement of the conductive fibers within regular ones as knitting is also a single strand building up row after row, not the same as weaving where you have parallel and perpendicular fibers– if you knit conductive yarn into the whole glove you will have one big point of contact, not individual finger sensors.
Becky – with this, could you knit your own VR gloves?
Knitting with conductive fibers is great for making stretch sensors, as the resistance will drop when the fibers are pulled into contact. So, I guess you could make gloves, but you’d have to have some careful placement of the conductive fibers within regular ones as knitting is also a single strand building up row after row, not the same as weaving where you have parallel and perpendicular fibers– if you knit conductive yarn into the whole glove you will have one big point of contact, not individual finger sensors.