Pulse Necklace 22Nov2009

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Hack Notes, Pulse Choker, Nov 22nd, 2009[edit]

Talk with Ali[edit]

I met Ali Crockett, a lady who used to work at Craft Technology with Leah Buechley back in the day. She actually did the design work for some of the lillypad stuff! She's been doing soft circuit stuff for about 3 years.

We talked about using conductive thread in a sewing machine, and she said she'd done that lots, and gave two pieces of advice: first, use thicker versions of conductive thread, they fray/catch less. And second, use the conductive thread only in the bobbin - put some other thread in the main spool. This also helps with the strain relief problem, and it will incidentally make it so that only one thread needs to be (manually) wound around each LED, which is good.

She brought in a small bracelet that implements an "AND" gate, and had awesome conductive fabric -> surface mount IC circuit, covered with epoxy. Plus it had two SMD LEDs with SMD resistors, soldered to crimp beads, and then conductive thread into the conductive fabric. The whole thing was super small. She repaired one of the LED solder points while at NB.

She runs aniomagic, a company that sells some soft circuit hacking stuff. I bought a bracelet kit, it should be very interesting to see how that works in practice, maybe we can get inspired.