How to Make a Practical Stretch Circuit for Your Wearable Tech #WearableWednesday #Wearabletech @RachelFreire
How often have you stitched LEDs onto a t-shirt only to find that the stitching is puckered or the stitching doesn’t allow the fabric to move? I’ve always stayed away from stretch fabric because I know conductive thread doesn’t give. However, I found this great technique by Rachel Freire on Instructables that explains exactly how to embed circuits so they can move the way you do. Hello yoga wear!
The idea is to bond lycra conductive fabric between two layers of powernet using stretch fusible film. I’ve used fusible fabrics before, but I never knew there was stretchable film. You can see how the conductive fabric is first treated with the fusible film and cut into skinny traces, as well as buttons for the connections.
Once the pieces are assembled and ironed, you can easily attach LEDs and stitchable microcontrollers using conductive thread. Rachel has bigger plans for her pieces and is creating a Second Skin that will enable a designer to test different circuits all over the body quickly with tubing and cables. You can check out more pics of her progress on her Flickr album, and please do follow her work as she will be making it open source. So, ready to try your hand at a stretch circuit? Order some of our Knit Conductive Fabric and make your own beautiful swirls of electronic goodness. What outfit will you hack?
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
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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 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Thonny and Git Versions, Plenty of Projects and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!