DIY e-textiles – Knit touchpad

Plusea (Hannah Perner-Wilson) added a new e-textile component to her DIY wearable electronic component portfolio, a Knit Touchpad.

The idea of the Knit Touchpad is to replicate a textile based input similar as the one we use on our notebooks. The advantage of a textile touchpad is: it can be part of a garment or furniture cover – think about how cool it would be do have the TV remote integrated into the couch.

Plusea uses for the sensor pad material from an anti-static glove which is knit from stretchy fibers that include poorly conductive, resistive yarns.

The type of knitted, conductive yarns used in anti-static gloves make them perfectly suitable for a touchpad sensor ‘because of the way the fibers in knits travel from one side to the other, from top to bottom, the resistive yarn travels it doubles back on itself in a way that maintains the resistive connection even when the knit is cut (interrupted). The surface thus has a unique resistance at any point when measuring from at least three points. In this demonstration I chose to measure from all four corners‘ as Plusea explains in her instructions.

Click over to Plusea’s Instructables and check it out – it’s amazingly simple to build (thanks to the detailed instructions) and opens a wide range of interaction possibilities for your wearable electronic projects.

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