E-Textiles and Wearables II

For this week’s assignment I looked for some inspiration on Pinterest and there I found this Rudolph Christmas decoration. It was also used as an e-textile, but using a battery and a switch, which would has fit perfectly for our class “E-textiles and wearables I”. So I decided to modify this idea, so that it fits for this class too. For this, I thought about including a LED for the nose, like the Rudolph of Pinterest has, but also putting a loudspeaker into it, which will play “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer” by giving an interactive input. For these interactive inputs, I thought about putting pressure sensors into the antlers of the reindeer. For the sensors I used nearly the same principal like in Wearables I – conductive fabric, semi-conductive fabric, and again conductive fabric. I did the sensor in the shape of the antlers to have a bigger area, which will react on pressure. After preparing the reindeer and the sensors, I had to think about the connections between LED, pressure sensor and Lilypad, as well as the connection between loudspeaker, pressure sensor and Lilypad. For the LED-circuit, I can nearly use the circuit scheme of Wearables I. For the loudspeaker-circuit I searched the internet and found this helping website.

This scheme helped me to understand the connections I need to make for my circuit.

To understand the circuit a little bit better, this video helped me a lot because it has nearly the same components I want to use, the only difference is that I want to use an interactive input coming from my pressure sensors, sitting in the antlers of the reindeer, while she just uses the on- / off-switch of the Lilypad.

For my Arduino codes I searched for some help in the “Arduino Cookbook” and found it in Chapter 6.1 Detecting Movement and Chapter 9.2 Playing a Simple Melody. Then, I opened the Arduino-software and had a closer look on the example codes in the basic-chapter, and fortunately the Blink-code helped me a lot. Therefore, I decided to take this given code and adjusted it to my purposes.

I will provide my code here.

After finishing my code, I tested my sensors by doing my circuit with cables, an Arduino and my written code. You can see my circuit below under my pictorial documentations.

Unfortunately, I did not finish my assignment for this week, but I definitely will! :)

Here are some pictorial documentations.