The high-low tech team at MIT under the lead of eTextile innovator Leah Buechley started a very interesting project called LilyPond, a eTextile Web community and place for collaboration and sharing of eTextile projects.

LilyPond is aiming to pond the LilyPad community and to provide support for people who want to design and create soft, interactive circuits with the LilyPad Arduino toolkit.

Currently there are over 60 projects posted on the LilyPond site with a short description. The tutorial and resource pages are not yet in operation.

The LilyPond project team Leah Buechley, Emily Lovell, Kanjun Qiu and Linda Delafuente created a site which will become over time a great place to find infos around eTextile materials and techniques and a place to share eTextile designs with the community.

Even though some of the site’s functions are not yet available, browsing through the many project intros already available will serve as inspirational trip through the e-Textile world.

Interactive clothing is attracted the interest of performers who are experimenting with the possibilities technology enhanced costumes to add a new dimension of interaction to their shows.

You might say this is not new, costumes have always been one of the attention points of performances. Yes, this is correct but by embedding technologies these costumes can create their own activity, interacting with the performer instead of being passive, an eye candy or a static representation.

Wearable technologies, in itself mostly in the experimental stage, have been adopted by the highly creative area of art and performance.

The creators and designers of experimental, interactive costumes often share their creation to inspire others to build upon, to add their creative line.

The Instructable of the ‘Wireless Dance Costume‘ is a team work of Eric Lindsay (Composer), Amy Burrell and Jay Garst (Costume Designer), Utam Moses (Choreographer) and Benjamin Zaitlen and Alex Jacobs (Software and Hardware Design).

Using LilyPad components and XBee together with pressure and flex sensors and connecting everything with conductive thread will detect and transmit the movements and interactions of a dancer or a group of  dancer between them or to a ‘base station’ which can use the signals of the individual dancers to generate sound, change the lighting in sync with the movements or trigger light or other costume transforming actions on other dancers.

Interactive – with emphasis on active – stage wear will add another dimension to the special effects like stage lightning, sound and all the other visual and audible stimulus techniques choreographer use to captivate, to fascinate the audience.

We have reported about the Northpaw by Sensebridge, an anklet that indicates the direction via vibration. Today’s DIY project introduction called ‘Southpaw‘ could be seen as complementing the directional wearable assistant by adding a distance detecting functionality to a glove.

Southpaw by Instructables member south_paw has a sonar range finder and a small LCD screen integrated. Raise your smart glove hand and point it to an object you like to know the distance like standing on a cliff and wonder how deep the drop is, the Southpaw glove will tell you.

The conversion of the sonar range finder data into length values is done with a LilyPad Arduino Which needs to be also placed into the glove as well as the batteries. Sound complicated? Click over to the Instructables project page and you will find all information, the materials needed, Arduino code and the build process.

You might think squeezing everything into a glove is overkill, maybe but the techniques and the design concept is very interesting and can serve as building block for your own, distance reacting, technology enriched clothing project.

Judging on the many interactive glove projects we have seen so far, gloves in itself seems to trigger a lot of inspiration, maybe because we like to have something powerful, supernatural at/in our hands.

Thanks Lynne for the tip to this project.

eTextile designer will love the Frogr, a creation of Angella Mackey and David McCallum. The Frogr is an adapter – called shield in Arduino terminology – give a higher degree of flexibility when creating multiple designs which require the LilyPad.

The LilyPad has to be sewn onto the textile circuit to make good contact. Creating a range of designs, each requiring the LilyPad means you need to buy for each one a LilyPad which can quickly turn out as expensive creativity.

With the Frogr shield you can quickly interchange the LilyPad to other designs as it extends the LilyPad contacts to snap buttons. The counterpart of the snap buttons are at the end of the the conductive trace in you garment design, just waiting to be connected to the LilyPad/Frogr combo.

A nice design twist of the Frogr is the battery pouch below the LilyPad where you can slip in two 3V coin cell batteries – neat.

The Frogr can also become very handy when the same garment design could have different applications requiring different versions of software on the LilyPad. Just prepare two Frogr ready LiliPad modules with different software loaded and swap them out in no time during demonstration of the flexibility of your designs.

Check out the making-off the Frogr via Angella’s Flickr photo stream. The temple for the Frogr shield and stencil for the garment can be found on the Frogr project site.

A simple yet brilliant idea, something many eTextile creators have been waiting for to be invented.

[via: Fashioning Technology]

Instructables member markaleung made one of those sensible wearable electronic concepts I love for their simplicity and sensibility in regard to the functionality offered: the Weight sensing Tote Bag.

Knowing the weight of a bag, especially when flying somewhere can be a question of how much money we have to shell out when in front of the check-in counter.

This DIY weight sensing bag might not be extremely accurate nor will it be the most critical part of a plane trip but knowing the weight that presses on your shoulder all day long should concern you to avoid health problems in the years ahead.

To get a ‘feeling’ of your bags weight a force sensitive resistor in the shoulder strap measures how hard the strap is pressing on the shoulder. The pressure value is then used to control how fast LEDs pulsate or how many LEDs will be lit up to indicate preset weight values.

No worry you don’t have to go around with blinking light from your bag, the system is designed to light up only when a button is pressed to give off a light code telling the approximate weight. Very smart and sensible design.

The heavy, sensible lifting in form of converting the pressure sensor data into light effects is done by a LilyPad which is powered by one AAA battery.The provided Arduino code is calibrated at approximately 10-11 pounds but can be modified to your specific needs.

Click over to the very detailed DIY instructions including the LilyPad Arduino source code to give you a quick start.

CU Boulder GEEN 1400 Engineering Costumes students Chris Francklyn, Diana George, Jenna Sobieray and Alex Cossoff posted a hot-cool project on Instructables, the ‘How to make a Heating and Cooling Jacket‘ project.

The jacket has the capability to sense the temperature inside the jacket and turning on the heating or cooling elements as needed to to keep a preset constant temperature. This would mean especially during spring and autumn when the temperature outside makes usually erratic jumps between extremes, this cool jacket could be a hot clothing item.

The team uses the LilyPad as the intelligent part of the jacket to collect the temperature sensor data throughout the jacket – a total of six sensors are used/recommendet – and indicates the temperature via LEDs which can be place like in this instructions or in other forms fitting to your style taste.

Components such as the LilyPad, temperature sensors, LEDs and power supply are placed preferable on a removable inner liner and connected via conductive yarn. A removable inner liner has the advantage the intelligent part of the jacket could theoretically be used in different jackets as long as the inner liner fits in them. It also allows a hassle free cleaning of the outer shell of a jackets by unzipping the inner part.

A cool feature is to add flexible solar panels to the outer shell or hood making use of sunlight to generate power for the LilyPad and LEDs.

Before you get now very exited about making a heating/cooling jacket, the current Instructables contains only the temperature sensing part and flexible solar panel integration. The team will follow up on this project next month by adding heating and cooling technologies.

I am very curious to see what their proposal will be I only know that many reader of talk2myShirt have heating and/or cooling garments very high on their wish lists.

Kanjun Qiu created at the MIT Media Lab for the High-Low Tech research group the beautifully designed Soundie, a hoodie with touch sensitive areas triggering sound and light effects.

The Soundie is Kanjun’s exploration into eTextiles and the LilyPad system. The result is the Soundie, one of the best demonstrator/prototypes I have come across in my restless search for wearable electronic developments.

This project combines most to the eTextile elements and techniques, giving an excellent overview about the use of textile optimized components and technologies.

The complexity of building the Soundie is medium as Kanjun has published a very detailed overview on Instructables.

You will find every step carefully explained including a comprehensive material list starting with the LilyPad main board, power and light modules, conductive fabric and thread, a speaker module and a piece of clothing you want to upgrade with light and sound.

The Instructables includes the Arduino source code to get you started quickly and to serve as basis for further hacking to your own liking.

Kanjun’s motivation to create the Soundie was  ‘… to inspire other applications. The Soundie was designed  with purely artistic intentions and with absolutely no practical applications in mind.’

From a clothing designer point of view, the focus is on style and aesthetics. From an electronic engineer point of view, the power efficient circuit design is one of the keys between being a master or mediocre in this profession.

Designing electrical function with high power efficiency in mind minimizes the need of power, allowing to use smaller batteries or to have longer working time for the electronic.

The highly informative Computational Textiles as Materials for Creativity Weblog  featured last Sunday the power topic for the LilyPad. It gives a rule of thump guide on how to estimate the battery size when using the LilyPad board in eTextile projects.

It’s a very first average estimate and the actual power requirements will depend  on how much/long the LilyPad will be running during the use of the application you design. If the LilyPad has to be active, is running a program all the time, the power consumption will be higher.

To make a more accurate power consumption calculation I strongly suggest to read the ‘important note about the power supply’ on Leah Buechley‘s ‘Turn signal biking jacket‘ DIY instructions.

Leah explains very nicely how the selection of conductive yarn and the distance between the LilyPad and the battery in your eTextile project can influence the power needs.

On a related note: one of our CONNECTION members is looking for a battery for a wearable electronic project. Maybe you can check out his requirements and have some tips?

Communicating clothing is one of the most interesting concepts in the interactive fashion domain and well taken care off especially by the eTextile DIY community.

Instructables member ArduinoFun has posted a inspirational project called ‘Arduino Lilypad Interactive Passion Sensing Scarf‘ using the LilyPad Arduino and conductive yarn to create the textile circuit into a scarf.

Naturally there will be two or more of these intelligent, interactive scarfs needed to get the full benefit – think about it when you set out to make this your first eTextile DIY project of 2010.

The scarf is fitted with the LilyPad for the processing, a battery for power and a infrared emitter/detector. This IR sensor will get active once a second smart scarf is in close proximity. The two scarfs recognize each other and change the color of an concealed LED from blue (the color of loneliness) to the color red for closeness.

A simple but great concept to expand with more interactivity as ArduinoFun also points out in the Instructables.

The Arduino code is included in the instructions making it possible to create a pair of passionate scarfs in time for Valentines Day.

A nicely designed e-textile DIY project from Instructables member Kanjun is the ‘musical touch-sensitive light-up hoodie‘.

This interactive hoodie changes it’s behavior – yeah, smart clothing will have it’s own character – depending on how charged you are.

Everyone has more or less  body conductivity which is influenced by the environment. Humidity level, the material of our clothing are some factors influencing the body conductivity.

This body charge can be dangerous to sensitive electronic devices that’s why technicians as well as DIY enthusiasts need to ground themselves when opening a computer case for example.

Kayun’s hoodie is making use of this fact to visualize our charging level via light pattern and to make our charge level audible via a small speaker inside the hoodie.

The core elements of this fabulously documented DIY project revolve around the LilyPad system, conductive thread and fabric and some other commonly available crafting materials.

The instructions provide a wealth of tips and examples on how to plan, design and integrate a smart system into an exiting piece of clothing. Kayun included the code for the LilyPad Arduino to get you started in no time but the system has a lot of room for variations and your own creative expansion of this concept.

Click over and check out the complete instruction and charge yourself up to make an ‘musical touch-sensitive light-up hoodie‘ that shows how energized you are.