Looking for a special something for your special someone to give a electrifying Valentine’s Day gift? Here is a tip: Sparkfun is running a Plushbot Class on Saturday Feb 11th at the Sparkfun HQ in Boulder, CO from 9am until 5pm

The eTextile class centers around the Plushbot design, which incorporates electronics into stuffed animals to create interactive toys.

This class offers a excellent opportunity not only to pick up eTextile tips and tricks but also to walk away with a one-of-a-kind Valentine’s Day present.

Instructors of this class will be Yingdan Huang, the creator of the Plushbot, Lindsay, Jeff and Dia, eTextile goddess at Sparkfun.

You will learn about and handle eTextile elements like light sensor, LEDs, switches and buzzer, flex sensor, conductive thread, felt, a 1000mAh Lipo Battery and a LilyPad Simple Board.

Minimum requirement for participation is to thread a needle – in case you are not that far yet – still time to practice until Saturday.

You will also need to bring your own laptop with Arduino software installed – please see all details on Sparkfun’s website.

Wish you a happy sewing, stitching and switching.

Picking up on my habit featuring DIY infos for the weekend, the recent announcement of Adafruit about the soon to be launched wearable electronic platform called Flora, designed by Limor Fried aka Ladyada, is promising a exiting year ahead for the eTextile community.

Flora will be an alternative to the currently available LilyPad, a wearable computing platform used by the eTextile community as essential part in their tool box.

The circular shape is taking it’s lead from the LilyPad but Flora comes with a smaller footprint measuring just 44.45mm (1.75 inch) in diameter compared to 50mm (1.97 inch) of the LilyPad.

A great advancement is also the inclusion of a mini-USB connector on the Flora board, taking away the need of an additional breakout board for USB connection to a computer. This on-board USB connector makes updating of the Flora software on the fly easy.

14 sewing tap pads for attachment and electrical connection will give lot of room to create complex wearable tech systems.

Almost any battery can be connected safely to the Flora with voltages ranging form 3.5v to 16v DC and allow battery chemistry of LiIon/LiPoly, LiFe, alkaline or rechargeable NiMh/NiCad batteries. No worry about polarity of the battery, the Flora will not give up on you when accidentally the battery is connected in the wrong way. A integrated schottky diode will protect the electronic.

The Flora platform will be expanded with additional modules such as Bluetooth, GPS, 3-axis accelerometer, compass module, flex sensor, piezo, IR LED, push button, embroidered + capacitive keypad, OLED and more to be added in future.

This new wearable electronics platform will open – or should I say unleash – a new wave of wearable tech creativity, providing beginners and professional alike a powerful tool to make, hack and design the fashion of the future.

I will certainly keep you posted on the progress and release of the Flora platform.

Read more details about Flora at Adafruit Industries

Sparkfun is continuously expanding their eTextile portfolio to the delight of many eTextile sewing, stitching, knitting, weaving  and soldering fashion hackers.

The latest addition is the ProtoSnap LilyPad E-Sewing Kit, a card that contains a LilyPad Coin cell Battery holder, one LilyPad Button and LilyPad Slide Switch and five white LilyPad LEDs. To round up this kit, a needle set and a 30′ Bobbin of conductive thread comes together with this Kit card.

What is so incredibly fantastic on the ProtoSnap is: it serves as quick prototype board. All components are connected on this breakout board.

Once the functionality is established for your next great eTextile project and everything works as you have imagined it’s time to break out all the components and sew them into place on your garment.

The ProtoSnap Kit is targeted towards beginners in eTextile or electronics in general, demonstrating in a visual way the functionality and the flow of electricity which is nicely market on the ProtoSnap board.

A very cool idea for a hot summer time fashion hacking.

For your reference – here is the link to all the eTextiles goodies by Sparfun.

Most of the time talk2myShirt reports about eTextile developments and experiments carried out by creative minds around the globe. Usually these news originate from the experts, from people who invent and experiment.

Today’s article is about a group of girls, The ‘Bird Wheel‘ with a passion for cycling ranging from building world class custom frames, advocating public policy that makes cycling safer for everyone and a good deal of talk goes into finding cool cycling shops and fashionable cycling apparel.

It seems the ‘cycling safer for everyone’ part inspired the Bird Wheel girls tho picked up the Turn-Signal-Biking-Jacket design from Leah Buechley – one of the best and it seems very useful experimental designs with eTextiles – and made their own version for safer cycling.

How refreshing to see people making use of wearable technology not just out of pure scientific interest or technological geekiness but driven by a practical need that comes from another passion – in this case from cyclists at heart.

Connecting to yesterdays solar power related article, the summer sun mood many people enjoying right now and the eTextile treasure chest from Meg Grant adds up to an amazing DIY solar cell technique I was really astound when seeing it the first time.

Solar power to electricity conversion with the use of naked diodes. Yeah – all those little black buggers lying around, tossed off the work bench into the trash bin – these little guys are able to transform solar energy into electricity as soon as they are stripped down their plastic encasing.

Meg picked up this know-how from The Naked Scientists which have a step-by-step instruction posted on their site along with a video clip.

Actually simple to do once you know that naked diodes can be used as solar energy harvester. Meg beautified the naked diodes and created an almost 100% textile solar panel, the Wearable Solar Energy – amazing.

Oh I know what you might say/think now – the Diode solar panel can only generate a small amount of voltage and milliamps but seeing the tiny amount of solar to electricity energy researcher can achieve with a paper or plastic sheet – Meg’s Diode solar panel can easily compete with that.

The Video Coat from David Forbes is the ultimate wearable display hack I came across so far. Many artists and Haute Tech designers embrace the idea of animating clothing with light effects and images.

Having worked myself in this field intensively for a couple of years I know how challenging this endeavor is, what hard work it demands to even produce a demonstrator prototype.

Light animated textiles are one of the biggest challenges in the wearable technology domain. Difficult to realize but hugely rewarding once it can be done. Creating fluid light pattern or like this design even motion pictures on a garment never ever fails the surprise, amaze people when watch the real-time transformation of the pattern on garments.

David’s Video Coat is essentially a fully functional TV set working with regular NTSC video signal. The display has a resolution of 160×120 pixel/LED, if you do the math this ends up in 19,200 LEDs!

Clusters of LED’s are mounted on strips of Flex-PCB which in turn cover the coats front, back and even include the arm parts. The screen basically wraps around the body giving to bystanders a 360 degree viewing experience.

Click over to David’s project page and check out more images and technical details.

To see the Video Coat in action, below is one of the videos David has put on his YouTube account.

The Video Coat deserves a place in the history of wearable displays by pushing the boundaries of imagination far into the future – may be not as commercial product in this form but it triggers a lot of attention and excitement of what could be possibly done.

[via: Geekologie]

GPS has come a long way starting out as an exclusively used technology by the military, then migrated to the aviation industry and finally became accessible to the general public as car navigation and nowadays GPS is a standard feature in many of the hand-held personal electronic devices like cell phones.

People like me who get easily lost in not so frequently visited places, the accessibility of pocket GPS is more than compensating for the underdeveloped orientation sense.

Until now I have to take out my cellphone and check if I am still heading in the direction I want to go but it seems I can soon rely on my bag to tell me where to go.

Josh, a innovator from Chicago, is showing the direction GPS technology could head in the near future – being an indispensable feature in clothing and fashion accessories. His DIY project MapBag integrates a GPS module which constantly evaluates the wearer’s current heading and the location of magnetic North, or the relative location of a user-defined way-point.

The unique design twist on the MapBag is  the UI, the user interaction of the GPS information in the bag with the wearer – with a ring of 8 low profile, shaftless vibration motors on the back of the bag. Wearing the messenger bag in front over the chest, this ring of vibration motors give a tactile reading similar to a compass face.

Make sure you check out the project site of the MapBag – interesting to watch and inspirational – maybe something to pick up and translate/transform the wearable GPS into a jacket?

Josh used his MapBag for a couple of weeks and ‘… the slight pulses used to convey heading information have become second nature. Most importantly, I no longer find myself using street signs or depending on landmarks to discern my position in the city’s grid.‘

Oh – I love the MapBag too, not having to be afraid to get lost again while exploring a new place, small side streets in old, historical parts of a city.

Besides improving the orientation sense of people like me I can also imagine that this type of design can be useful for visually impaired people having this kind of way-finder with tactile reading discretely integrated in clothing of bags we wear.

via: Make

Sometimes people ask me if there is a way to replace headphones with smart textiles, sound coming out of a hood or from the fabric around the shoulder areas, near the ears.

What at first seems impossible is actually feasible with a bit of eTextile magic. Hannah, one of the most innovative personalities in the wearable technology space, published on her newly created Kit-of-no-Parts wearable tech website a possible way how to make sound with Fabric speakers.

Hannah picked up the work made earlier by Marcelo Coehlo’s paper speaker and the Accouphene Tuxedo created by Vincent Leclerc, added her own experience and expertise in wearable sound design and created an impressive overview, underlined with many examples on how to transform paper and fabrics into speaker.

The basic idea is to use a 2 dimensional spiral coil for the electric magnet instead of the more conventional 3D cylindrical coil wrapped around a magnet. To make this more exiting, the coil is integrated in the membrane, usually visible a cone shape but in this case, it is a swatch of fabric (or paper) which has the magnet function integrated and acts as membrane at the same time.

I was initially a little skeptic to get any kind of sound out of a 2D fabric swatch but to my surprise it works quite well. Sure, the sound output is far  from even cheap speaker quality but just seeing and hearing fabric placed on top of a magnet starts emitting sound is amazing.

Inspired by Hannah’s design guideline I did some experiments myself and like to share some of my observations while working on fabric sound.

Firstly – as stronger the magnet, as louder the sound will come out. Using magnetic buttons I had lying around didn’t do a good job but some small but super strong magnets worked very well.

The size of the spiral in relation to the size (diameter) of the magnet: conductive traces, made in the different ways Hannah describes on her project page, of the spiral not covering the magnet have little effect on loudness or sound quality. If you have only a small magnet it does not help to make the spiral much larger.

The type of fabric also influences the sound quality and loudness: somewhat stiffer fabric gives better results than soft fabric. I got the best results using ripstop fabric which is a woven, lightweight nylon based fabric.

Got interested? Click over to Kit-of-no-Parts, get creative and listen to the Sound of Fabric.

Hannah Perner-Wilson, currently working on her masters degree in the High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab, started the Kit-of-No-Parts project, a Website that presents easy to access information about ‘electronics crafting’.

I like the term ‘electronics crafting’, this distinguishes the work associated with electronic Textiles to the work of conventional electronic design.

Crafting electronics is what eTextile designer are doing most of the time, taking electrical functions like PCB traces, sensors, resistors or switches and craft them by using textile process technologies like weaving, stitching or knitting and the use of electrically conductive ink, thread and fabrics.

The Kit-of-No-Parts Website has a very appealing navigation structure in matrix form showing on one axis the process technologies and the other axis examples of which type of electrical function is most suitable to create with a specific process.

Sub-categories drill down into moor details for each process and material, providing application examples and links to other interesting places about wearable technology.

Kit-of-No-Parts is a brand new site with lot of Work in Progress but there is already lots of interesting information around which makes it a must-visit-and-bookmark site for eTextile designer.

via: The Twisted wrap

The use of wearable technology for performance wear on stage is one of the driving forces in the exploration of wearable technologies.

The VJacket is a great example on how to integrated a performers motion on stage to manipulate videos and sounds in real-time.

Built into the jacket are bend, touch and hit sensors which you can use to send OpenSoundControl or MIDI messages wireless to the VJ program of your choice, letting you control video effects and transitions, trigger clips and scratch frames all from the comfort of your own jacket.

Tyler Freeman and Andreas Zingerle, the creator of the VJacket, integrated 5 sensors into the VJacket: 1 Softpot, 2 piezos, 2 bend sensors, 1 photo resistor.

Check out the fantastic video clip, it shows how cool this type of stage outfit can be.

Tyler and Andreas make the VJacket development freely accessible for everyone to follow as DIY instruction on the VJacket project blog.