Fabricademy: Week 5: eTextiles & sensors : Assignment 2
Assignment 2: ATtiny Circuit
Just to give a quick intro about what teh week was about, here is a review below from the documentation on Assignment 1.
This class focused on exploring how we can produce soft circuits and sensors, to embed them into garments and wearables, using soft circuits and soft actuators. We will start with an overview of materials, components, tools and projects. Our global tutors were Hannah Pierre Wilson and Mika Satomi who make up KOBAKANT.
In this week’s course, students will be introduced to an overview of the field of electronic textiles, example works in the field as well as materials and technical developments that have made these projects possible. We will go into details on different techniques for making soft/flexible/fabric circuits.
We will also introduce idea of micro-controllers using ATTINY as an example. We will cover simple exercise of opening blink LED example, going over the code basic and uploading to have the first step into arduino programming.
The exercise for the week will be to replicate/copy the swatch example, program your own ATTINY microcontroller with example code and design a basic circuit using the techniques of your choice.
We ask each student to create at least one analog fabric sensor and one digital sensor we mention in the course. Then create a fabric circuit using one or more of the connection technique (embroidered circuit, laser cut circuit, vinyl cut circuit) we cover in the course. They can connect the sensors simply with LED and a battery, or connect with programmed ATTINY to give a behaviour to the fabric circuit. One can use buzzer speaker instead of LED as an actuator.
Breadboards, Arduino’s & ATtiny programmers
Assignment 2 was presented by the Kobakant team for us to continue with if we felt we were happy with the first assignment.
As a beginner I was unsure about this at first, but I later found that it was a subject that could be revisited through the course and I started to understand the concepts a lot more.
The next step was to test our sensors and their ranges using a Potentiometer
A potentiometer is a simple knob that provides a variable resistance, which we can read into the Arduino board as an analog value. In this example, that value controls the rate at which an LED blinks. We connect three wires to the Arduino board. The first goes to ground from one of the outer pins of the potentiometer. – Wikipedia
- We used the blue potentiometer turnable switch (situated in the centre of the white breadboard*) to adjust the resistance to make it at the optimal setting.
- *breadboard: short white board which has areas for positive and negative and wires can be connected in as well as LED’s and other switches like potentiometers or even buzzers and so on
- This would show the best results of resistance for when we stretched our sensors or pushed our pressure sensors.
- Using the Arduino program and ATtiny programmer (the teal-turquoise blue-green board), we were able to see our sensor resistance range
- e.g.: when we stretch the long textile tube to a taught position, the potentiometer reads a different reading from when it is relaxed and let loose.
- If you would like the code for the Digital potentiometer, please see the pdf here.
Notes from the Class & Fabricademy site:
DIY Attiny Programming Shield tutorial
Attiny soft sensor and coil speaker
You could also do the tutorial of Liza Stark with the Attiny embroidery here
Potential Materials to use:
– Conductive fabric copper rip-stop
– Conductive fabric silver stretch
– conductive thread Karl-grimm copper thread
– Conductive thread statex silver plated nylon
– conductive yarn LessEMF
– Eeonyx stretch sensor fabric
– Eeonyx non-woven sensor fabric – Cotton/silk woven non-stretch fabrics
– Cotton Jersey stretch fabric
– cotton thread
– felt and/or neoprene
– 3mm thick foam
– Fusible interfacing (Thermoweb Heat’n Bond Ultra Hold iron-on Adhesive) – Metal Beads
– Glass/plastic beads (for isolation, hole should be big enough for conductive thread)
– snap press/ poppers (ideally 7mm diameter, if not 10mm) – ATTINY85
– 8pin socket
– various resisters
– LED (SMD (PLCC2 and Through-hole)
– speaker/buzzer
– purfboard
– 3V battery
– 3V battery holder (or we make fabric battery holder)
– Flux
– Solder
– single core wire or bare wire – copper foil sheet
– capton tape or sheet (solder mask) Tools:
– Sewing needles
– Scissors
– Fabric Scissors
– Iron
– crochet hooks
– Sewing machine*
– knitting mill*
– knitting machine*
– knitting needle* – laser cutter*
– vinyl cutter* – Breadboard
– jumper cable
– crocodile clip
– Soldering iron
– multimeter
– thin nose plier
– wire cutter/ knipper
– USB ATTINY programmer
– computer with Arduino IDE * optional
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