Research: felting conductive threads

Research on different conductive threads, within felted wool.

Goal

Checking if and which conductive thread survives felting and can be used making “drawings”  by discoloring of thermochromatic inkt applying current to the thread.

Felting

The idea is to insert the threads between the layers of wet felting. Let it dry, measure the resistance, dye the felt in thermo-chromatic ink and check the resistance again. In a former experience the “normal” silver thread was destroyed (broken – not conductive anymore) after this process.

Data:

felt from Nea Zealand 14.70 euro per kg
felting: 6 thin layers: three thin layers – layer of threads – three thin layers
thickness layer of felt: 2.5 mm
wet felting with warm water and soap, 30 minutes
threads: length around 10 inch = 25 centimeters

room temeprature: 20 degrees C. Important because the Thermo chromatic ink has a discoloring point at around 30 degrees C.

Measurements of resistance after felting and drying (checking if the wire is still conductive)

resistance: in Ohm (using a cheap multimeter, 15% of error)
1. 120 elinox PSPO 30075
2. 110 stainless steel 0.06
3. 1300 elistat grey Phtgi-STMT 74/3
4. 200 elinox orange PSS 30070
5. 17 Conductive Thread – 234/34 4ply  14 Ohms per foot (within margin)
6. 400 Conductive Thread – 117/17 2ply 300 Ohms per foot

Measurements of resistance after applying Thermo ink

resistance: in Ohm (using a cheap multimeter)
1. 100, elinox PSPO 30075
2. 84, stainless steel 0.06
3. 1340, elistat grey Phtgi-STMT 74/3
4. 300, elinox orange PSS 30070
5. 20, Conductive Thread – 234/34 4ply  14 Ohms per foot (within margin)
6. 600, Conductive Thread – 117/17 2ply 300 Ohms per foot

conclusion: the resistance after felting and applying the dye is not really changed for any of the conductive threads.

(In a former not documented comparable test the conductive threads 5 and 6 where not conductive anymore.)

Warming (discoloring) effect: (purpose of this setup is investigating the thermo effect)

1. 5V, current 40 mA, effect not visible (because of textile enclosure around metal thread?)
2. 5V, current 50 mA, effect visible after 30 seconds
3. 5V, current 0 mA, no effect (expected: resistance already very high, so a low current)
4. 5V, current 20 mA, thermo effect barely visible
5. 5V, current 180 mA, thermo effect very good and within seconds visible (180 mA is a lot for an Arduino)
6. 5V,  current 10 mA, thermo effect barely visible

Conclusion: to get an effect we need a current of at least 50 mA, fast effect 120-180 mA.
The resistance of the conductive thread in combination with the voltage applied (Arduino 5V, or with a relais a higher voltage).
All the threads have survived this test: the starting resistance is maintainend.
The elinox with the protecting outer layer of textile is isolating the metal thread so the effect is not visible where a bare metal thread with comparable resistance has a visible effect

Of course the length of the thread is linear related to the resistance: with a longer thread you need more voltage to get the same effect.

Current at an interval for maintaining the white line

Our hypothesis is that the high current (180 mA) is not necessary all the time, because the felt is keeping warm along the discolored line even after the current is off. This led to a last experiment:
Can we use a relais and at what kind of interval between current on and off a clearly visible line is maintained?
Using the silver thread number 5:
Heating up time to get a clear white line: 40 seconds (4×10000 milliseconds)
The best maintainence was reached at: 2000 millis UP (Warming) and 500 milliseconds OFF

Seeing this effect we realized that the thickness of the felt is important. A next experiment will be done using the thread in a sandwich of less (2) layers of felt, and a third using the thread in a combination of 4-5 layers at one side and two at the other side.

Of course also the amount of applied thermo chromatic ink is important. We are thinking about a way of measuring this amount, because at the moemnt we observe that the felt is not absorbing equal amounts everywhere.

Pictures of the first process (felting):

1.felting

2.insert conductive threads after 3 layers, and

3. add three more layers

4. adding hot water and soap

5. felting by hand power

5.drying on a steam engine (not using the steam)

6.checking wires against the light

7.measuring the resistance: all wires are still conducting current.

————  ————  ————  ————  ————  ————  ————  ————  ————  ————

Applying the thermo chromatic ink: wet

dried, with current running through thread number 5  (the blue in dried situation is less intense)

Thermo Ink, bought at Zijdelings , Tilburg, The Netherlands. You can see that the felt is not absorbing the ink evenly.

 

NASA Challenge, final result

As a final result the vest in presentation stage.

The improvements where:

• The vest has an incredible nice lining now, so we can really wear it without getting entangled in the electronics.
• The center big LED is glowing nicely and reacting if there is an exoplanet entered (by using the wii remote inside the felted Kepler Space Telescope) which is habitable.
• The Liquid Crystal use their backlight to indicate which exoplanet is habitable (by blinking)
• On the concept side: the vest is now a means to adopt exoplanets to make them less lonely.
• There still is no page for inserting your names to adopt an exoplanet

For the rest working with the Raspberry Pi in this crowded environment proved difficult: it became slow, and we had to use a list of exoplanet which was already downloaded (making it less updatable).

Thanks to the team!!!:

• Anja
• Meg
• Amran

 

Pictures of details: (coming)

 

Lovable Wearable Data!

Here is a decscription of our project:

http://spaceappschallenge.org/project/wearable-solar-vest/

We work on this lovable vest (seen at the back) connected to lovable data of exoplanets.

We have a nice team of e-textilers, programmers, soldering experts…

We received an exo-cake in the last hour before the presentation:

 

Wearable NASA challenge

This involvement http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/ seems very exciting!

It is a problem which challenge to choose from “We Love DATA”, or “Solar Flares”, or “Diamond in the sky”?

All challenges seems so interesting!

There is no gear in Amsterdam,  I have prepared this felted vest. Could it be useful or just a barrier?

Backside:

(DIY Hand felted ), with electronics: LED’s and 5 Liquid crystal displays. The groups of LED’s are controlled by 5 Attiny2313′s, these Attiny’s can be influenced (UART) by one central Atmega328 with RF12. There is another Atega328 with RF12 controlling the 5 Liquid Crystals. The data can be shown on the 5 displays which are positioned in a circle on the back of the vest. To get the data inside the vest i am using a Rasberry Pi, which is connected to it’s own atmega328 with R12.

Possible lovely DATA!
In my imagination it is fun to connect your clothing to Space Data. The problem with space is that things happen on a timescale which is for us human beings rather slow. Like colliding galaxies. But there are some data changing faster, like sunactivity.
This silly interface is not really adapted for images . We need text or numbers.

Sunactivity
Although the websites covering the sun are producing amazing pictures, we also see graphics. After quite a search (if you know it it is easy as always) we discovered the plain numbers.
The Rasberry with a Python script can get data from the internet like:
sunactivity: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lists/ace/20130414_ace_swepam_1m.txt
This file is updated every minute (you have to change the date in the title, or do this in the python script.)

Also interesting is to take an image, udated all the time, and make processing analyse the circle of the sun, the rim, and indicated where the bright spots are turning to the visible side of the sun:

http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_171/512/latest.jpg

Exoplanets:
There is another contest about visualizing exoplanets. The group working on this has a github:
https://raw.github.com/hannorein/oec_tables/master/comma_separated/open_exoplanet_catalogue.txt
which can be transferred to the LED’s and the displays.
The Rasberry will be connected to a wii-remote control, using bluetooth to make changes to the data. (The wii will be hidden inside a satellite model.)

Vest: data flows

• raspberry + atmega RF12 -> names exoplanets -> sun activity
• (5) LCD -> atmega 328 <- RF12
• LED’s <— (5) Attiny2313 <—> atmega328 <- IR <- RF12

—
interactivity with wii-remote –> raspberry pi
(there is also an IR receiver in the vest)

Felted Kepler Space Telescope
Considerations: what way to go with this strange interface? Can we make it more game like? I was planning to hide the wii remote inside a model of Kepler:

http://www.paper-replika.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8057&Itemid=200144

I have made this model in felt, as a soft hideout for a wii remote controller:

Now that I have chosen for the Kepler Space Telescope (in soft version) the main focus should be the exoplanet data…

In principle this interface works but it has to be fine tuned and tested. And transporting it to Amsterdam will be scary: will it still work?

Game?
Now that the wii remote is hidden in the felted Space Telescope, it feels like becoming a game. I am currently checking al the connections. Starting with the Wii -accelerations- which works with the Raspberry…yesterday the Serial UART worked with the RF12 wireless to the vest. The next step is getting names of exoplanets on the displays in the vest.
There must be a way to make this into a game

for the NASA challenge, this group is having lot’s of links:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/263873400416105/

my nerd diary: (raspberry, arduino, v-usb links, problems and solutions)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/521015181263612/

Design Process of a Sustainable E-scarf

The environmental engineering scientist A. Köhler pointed out that the e-textiles of the near future will pose a problem to recycling of smart clothes, given the double nature of this material with fabrics and electronics.

He invited the e-textile workspace of V2 to come up with solutions. With this challenge in mind we started making a simple garment with electronics and documenting the design process.

From the start the garment had to be made of sustainable materials with easy separable components. We used recyclable synthetic yarns. The electronics was a chip, pollution sensor and LED bar. The visual design are texts and shapes from the LED bar.

In actually production of this prototype a lot went wrong, and the waste scared us: A design was transferred to an old (19nineties) Brother knitting machine using Designaknit. This combination of old hardware and current software was a waste of time. The knitting of the synthetic yarns proved to be more difficult than foreseen, thus wasting quite a lot of material. The only way the Brother could produced the scarf was a yoga like slow motion knitting with a double thread of the most fragile yarn. The electronic function was in line with the concept of sustainability; a warning against pollution. The gas sensor (MQ-6) is designed for room like spaces. Voltage experiments wasted two sensors. From testing we concluded that the sensor has to be deeply inside the scarf’s material. This means that the functioning of this type of electronics is depending on its being integrated.

Our conclusion is that the development of e-textiles may lead to sustainable solutions, but the process of inventing and prototyping is highly wasteful. If we are afraid to waste materials at development, we won’t develop anything anymore!

Authors B. v. Waardenberg, M. Toeters, 2012

E-publications about this e-scarf can be found in Itunes as an Ebook:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/design-process-of-an-e-scarf/id593298171?l=es&ls=1

and on Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259963

Glow (embroidery) experiment

Having made, years ago a lino cut print of a software game I made, i decided to do a remake in glow in the dark embroidery. First I was using the thread of Mindsets:

nitelight glow

http://www.mindsetsonline.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=418_627_465&products_id=1009672

and UV thread

http://www.mindsetsonline.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=418_627_465&products_id=1009671

But the thread was breaking all the time.

I told the local sewing machine shop my problem and they sold me the Gutermann thread.

(for instance: http://www.sewessential.co.uk/CategoryML.asp?CategoryID=1363&NumPerPage=100&page=1 )

This is about 5 euro’s and it down’t break (sometimes anyway).

Preparation:

Rather important is the preparation of the print in the software of the Pfaff embroidery machine. Reducing the colors and simplifying the image. (We use the 4D ssuite).

Three pictures of the experiments:

(We didn’t try to recreate the same colors as the print.)

The picture of the glos effect in the dark is even after some Photoshop enhancement not really the effect it has on the human eye. The glow is somewhat more powerful, certainly in the beginning and the color is more reddish. The colors of the Gutermann thread diminish in the low situation and the glow is more or less of the same color.

By the way, the print was a result of a picture I took of a bug in a digital game, I made in 1999, the game was called Quinck, and it was made in 2D Director. The algorithm was not yet righ, but the pictures of a rotation were certainly more exiting than when it was “like reality”. http://www.peghole.com/games/arena.html

Wir haben den ganzen Tag gehofft

When you are at the border between signs without meaning and signs with acquired meaning, you like spots of color, faint traces on a wall, textures, simple drawings, combinations of words and drawings and so on.
So also small bits of texts in other languages. The other language seems to carry a lot of meaning. More than the same words in your own language. This is the domain of autonomous art. It must be an aberration of the mind, or just the most important thing in the universe: making stories out of nothing.

So: “wir hoffen” in German, wir hoffen noch immer, wir haben den ganzen Tag gehoft. And that is exactly what we did, the whole day doing embroideries, and hoping, against all odds, that we would be able to find the key to the solutions of all problems in this silly drawing text combination.

The more the embroidery machine didn’t do what we wanted it to do, the more we hoped.

In the end we found the key to the solutions of all problems in another drawing in embroidery without a bit of text. But since this embroidery is too valuable to give away like that, I don’t show it of course!

But if you follow the road of pictures, you might find a clue…

Infinity

A friend posted a link to a website commenting on the fact that a drawing of the artist Escher resembled the universe:

I was bold enough to comment (in Dutch) that luckily the drawing of Escher didn’t expand like we think the universe does.

This was not so smart of me, because after that remark the universe (or the drawing) took revenche in an incredible way.
The sewing machine started making this embroidery:

which looks rather innocent as it represents the artists toilet. I was wondering why this machine was embroidering so diligently, till I rotated the image:

Now the image shows clearly what I have never suspected before: the infinity sign is even present in the artist toilet. This infinity sign is the fingerprint of our mathematical universe…and also parallel universes and wormholes are easily observable!

We can conclude from this revenge that the universe is one, we are all one and what we think influences immediately the other side of the universe (of course).

One final remark: this infinity sign is only visible for the male user of the toilet. Which was what the thinkers from the Middle Ages already knew (before the toilet ever existed).

Prepairing a bag…

This is the concept:
A (not so suspicously looking) bag will contain sensors that measure several data on pollution, temperature, radiation.
The goal is to have an independent source of what I am exposed to.
Also the data are gathered locally, not using a satelite, so the car driving next to my bicycle can be monitored.

To manage all the data, and to store these data on a SD card, adding the longitude and latitude, and time, we need several microprocessors. The microprocessors have to talk to each other, it will be a happy communicating bunch (with quite a lot of wiring).

Also the bag has four displays, one of which is a RGB (8×8) LED matrix.

The collected data will be sent wireless to a computer using RF12, when there is a laptop around which can receive.

Why not directly to a server using the internet? Well we are a bit suspicious, if there is a direct connection, somebody can hack it. So data collection will be done locally, and isolated.

First we made a test with the liquid displays and the RGB matrix.

 

Then we tested the GPS SDcard combination seperately on a bicycle tour.
http://dataminortools.blogspot.nl/2012/05/rotterdam-gps-coordinates-sketch.html

 

Then we had an array of sensors lined up:

What is left is to put this all together.
A bag is a wonderful thing, to put all this gear in a garment would be a little bit too much (maybe later if all has micro size…).
Also the power consumption is a bit outrageous, so the bag is also needed to carry the batteries.

Weaving and 3D printing (?)

Yes, whatever…(there were a lot of “COOL” sounds with every result, especially the total failures, a bit like the embarrasing situation that already the tuning of a sitar by an Indian sitarplayer in concert provokes a big applause from Western people.)

In a DEAF workshop

http://deaf.nl/program/modules/wearable-technology-workshop-3d-textiles

we mixed 3D printing of Ultimakers with textiles and/or weaving. We worked in a group of around 5 or 6 (never quite sure) at the same 3D printer. We were asked to work together on this theme of mixing 3D printing and weaving. This collaboration in our group was a bit of a very polite anti clash of different opinions, styles, ideas, thoughts of the members of this group. Polite anti-clash means that everybody in this group was aware that everybody was so different that actually we could never agree to work together on something, and we accepted that.

In this void there still was some cooperation and the energetic assistance of Joris made us produce two halves of his world famous vase at two 3D printers side by side during the first day. These double 3D prints were connected by human hair inserted manually between the layers coming from the nozzle of the Ultimaker, see pictures. We assembled blond and dark hair from the other workshop participants and inserted it between the layers.

This weaving together with blond and dark hair of a black and a white shape was supposed to be the knitting together of different cultures. Yes, even experimentally we had quite distinct universal ambitions!

The next day we did another shape with imploded sides, and used UV hairs (yes there was somebody with UV sensitive and even glow in the dark hair amongst the participants – these designers!) to reshape these imploded sides. This small shape with UV fabric on two sides was all we could do before being thrown out of the room by a enormous bunch of balloon driven people, heading straight for a table with not very alcoholic drinks.

Some other members of our group were, Asami Kiuchi, Florence Bost and Ricardo …. missing some names, but – did we ever introduced ourselves properly in this group?