Sketch #2 Your Touch Powers My Heart

Following the development of the 3 proposals detailed in the previous post we decided to go forwards with the hair light option. We began collecting materials including, accelerometers, LED's and found a local supplier of side-emitting fiberoptic cable. When we went to acquire the wig that was to hold the circuit and lights we came across an LED and fiber-optic affro wig.

It was hideous.

After looking at what such a thing could end up looking like we decided to see if we could find other ways to display touch and motion inputs.

We decided to incorporate the lights into a shirt that is intended to form a base upon which we can build further details such as an adapted version of the defense suit or other interactions. In its initial state the shirt is meant to incorporate the touch aspect of our hair idea, with the LED's stitched into the shirt lighting up and pulsing when the wearer touches someone.

Building:


We began the build by designing the circuit and sensor as a hard circuit using Fritzing and a physical breadboard.

Following the setup of the circuit and the writing of the basic touch/pulse code work could begin on the shirt and glove using the hard circuit as a guide.

The LED's were to light up in stages depending upon how long the touch was maintained, with each layer connecting to a different digital pin that was tasked to begin pulsing after a set number of pulses had been completed by the preceding sets of LED's.

On the shirt we wanted this progression to move from the forearm closest to the point of contact, up the arm towards the collar and eventually close to the heart.

In order to achieve this 4 sets of led's were sewn onto the undershirt, each in parallel working their way up the arm.

The sensor was to be sewn into the hand of the glove so that it could read when the user touched another person. The capacitive sensors we first looked at were ideal in term of their interaction but proved bulky as a result of the board they were placed within which made placing them upon the finger difficult.

In order to get around this we attempted to make our own touch sensor by placing an open wire into analog pin 0. A second wire was connected to power and ground and the connection between the two was left unconnected. When we tested this we were able to get a consistent change in the value read through analogRead when that connection was bridged by skin in order to detect a touch.

This solution allowed us the freedom of movement we needed in the fingers and worked consistently in the hard circuit. Unfortunately it proved far less predictable once incorporated into the soft-circuit of the glove. Further iterations will look into ways of achieving a similar touch reading in the palm or back of hand where the more stable capacitive sensors may work without hindering the wearer.

With the two pieces together, wired into the arduino placed upon the forearm the shirt lit up exactly as we had hoped, the light building up the arm and softly pulsing.





Finally, to start working towards the moveable clothing possibilities we were exploring with the defense suit idea we added a gauzy, stretchable shawl wrapped over galvanized wire ribs at the shoulders. In further iterations those ribs will hopefully be linked to hinges and small servo-motors which will make the clothing flaps rise and fall in order to change the outfit's shape.