Week 12 l Skin electronics

Global Instructor: Katja Vega

This week dealt with the idea of human-device symbiosis in the field of make-up, prosthesis and tattoos.

We had a tutorial on how to make stencils for circuits with Adobe Illustrator and how to cut them in the vinyl cutter. We did some experiments with conductive ink on our skin.

Skin Masquerade Party

We have electric paint from Bare conductive in our Lab but my skin is really sensitive I decided to wear instead a mask with neon pixels at the masquerade party. Some of my follow students tried it but they found out the electric paint itself was not conductive enough to build up a circuit on the skin.

Step 1: For the mask I chose an image and converted it with an online vector converter in a PDF document which I could open in Rhino. I used felt for the mask which i cut in the lasercutter.

Step 2: I soldered the neopixels and the wires. It is a series connection where all 4 neopixels are sharing a common node and the same current flows through them.

Step 3: I programed with little support the microcontroller. I used a Lilypad ATitiny 85. We did not program the ATtininy directly but we used the arduino as an In-circuit Serial Programmer (IPS) to upload the code via the Arduino on the ATtiny. Detailed instructions how to use an Arduino as an IPS were provided by the tutor, see following document

The libairy for Neopixel have to be installed before the code is uploaded. Using the library you have to determine what kind of neopixel, how many and in which color. (Digital colors from 0 - 255 red, blue, green are the basic colors where all other colors could be created.)

See the mask in action on the following clips:

Part 1

Part 2