Adventures in E-Textiles.

In honor of our "Textile Messages" symposium tomorrow, I made a special, fading, Poppy Necklace. The lights on each flower are sewn in parallel and connected to the Lilypad Simple Board. Using ModKit Alpha (beta doesn't have variables yet), I programmed them to fade with the analogwrite command and adding 5 points to the brightness scale (from 0-255).

I used layers of felt to keep the circuits insulated from each other - a handy trick that also added some solidity to the otherwise thin felt. In a nod to Leah Buechley's writing about moving from the invisible to the visible in engineering, I'm showing a picture of the back. As you may guess, a lot is insulated between the layers, but you can see the final circuit completed by connecting the smallest flower to the pins on the Lilypad that power it.

More pictures can be found on the Lilypond site and on my personal blog.