LilyPad design lights up the runway

LilyPad/fiber optic design created for Anna Reutinger’s fashion line - GMA

Dennis Cao, an electrical engineering student at UCLA, mixed the LilyPad with nine Red Green Blue (RGB) LED’s to emit a wide range of colors through fiber optic strands flowing out of a white halter style dress.

He writes "The code is fairly simple and I thought I’d share it (along with the assembly instructions) since the only documentation I’ve found online has been linearly fading LED’s, which doesn’t look as great in my opinion. My code uses pulse width modulation to fade in and out of different colors at a sinusoidal rate- (essentially this means turning on/off the LED at varying amounts, a brighter appearance meant that the LED was HIGH or ON at more times per second, increasing the frequency of the signal. )"

For his code and instructions go to http://redlobsta.tumblr.com/

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.

TEI2011: Calling all Superheros to the Design Challenge

The world could always use a new Superhero and 12 teams (see team list and superhero name and powers at: http://www.tei-conf.org/11/participation_/design-challenge/)  rose to the task to design costumes and superhero tools at the Fifth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction in Portugal.

Three teams walked away the winners of $1,000 each:

Category of inventiveness:  superhero Captain Chronomek from the Simon Fraser University team (whose first superhero battle was with the Portuguese airport security for two days)
Superhero Description: Once a humble industrial-revolution machinist, Skip Sprocket was transformed into Captain Chronomek: the Continuum’s top Post-Victorian-Pre-Singularity agent. A flying, time-traveling MacGyver, Captain Chronomek hacks the timeline with the technology of the past to prevent a dark future.
Team members: Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum and Allen Bevans.
See more on Captain Chronomek at: http://www.siat.sfu.ca/news/2011/535/

Category quality of execution: superhero Axon from the Technical University Eindhoven team. (Axon used only one LilyPad Arduino to run the 260 LEDs and 52 reed switches which consequentially required them to include 7 input and 7 output shift registers.)
Superhero Description: With his body being an endless source of energy, Axon defeats his enemies by collecting, directing and releasing that energy through a strong blast that wipes away everything on it’s path.
Team members: Jacquelyn van Kampen, Joost Aanen, Marianne Akker and Koen Beljaars
See more on Axon at: http://www.fashioningtech.com/profiles/blogs/super-hero-design-challenge  and
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/02/homebrew-superh.php

Category for presentation and style: superhero Godmode from Bauhaus University Weimar team
 Superhero Description: The results achieved were the consequence of invention pure and simple.
Team members: Daniel Wessolek, Jamie L. Ferguson and Jörg Brinkmann

To watch a video with all 12 of the Superheros in action visit: http://vimeo.com/19781019

Congratulations to all twelve teams!

If only Dorothy & Toto had this Find Home Detector....

This gives new meaning to follow the light...literally! The Find Home Detector is used to find the designers' way home, using an LED compass as the path to follow.  The device uses a LilyPad, GPS, an actual compass and some LEDs. Using the GPS to get a position and then calculate the direction to the location of the home. The compass is then used to get their heading so it is possible to indicate the direction to travel. See the full post & video at http://www.slickstreamer.info/2011_02_01_archive.html

Love the environmentally friendly design diagram

LilyPad Arduino Wireless Dance Costume Performance @ Indiana University

This 6 minute dance video of a performance at Indiana University's Buskirk-Chumley Theatre illustrates the power and versatility of the LilyPad components.  Eric Lindsay, the composer of "The Space Between Us" explains: "The costumes are embedded with LilyPad Ardino technology; One of the dancers' (with the round skirt) costume combines LilyPad components and a XBee (wireless transmitter) together with pressure and flex sensors connected by conductive thread, which detects and transmits the movements of the dancer to the composer's laptop, which are then used to generate and control sound within a MAX/MSP environment."

What this means is choreographers and dancers are no longer constrained within the parameters of the music, instead they are the musical creators through their movements. See http://vimeo.com/20403708 for the complete posting and to view this amazing performance, choreographed by Utam Moses.

Fun in the snow!

For those of you who are tired of the snow...try out what Sarah Angliss did..."For some Christmas fun, I added ten bright, white LEDs to the petticoat 0f this 1950s-style dress so I could move around parties in my own pool of light. You can see the dress in action in this video, taken in Brighton on a very snowy night in 2010. I was inspired by the electric ladies who used to perform in dresses festooned with lightbulbs, at the turn of the twentieth century."

"The LEDs are controlled by a Lilypad Arduino which lights them up in sequence. I’ve also connected a cheap accelerometer to the Arduino (just like the one you find inside an iPhone or Nintendo wii) so the circuit can tell when I’m moving."

Read her entire post and see her dress in action at: http://www.sarahangliss.com/exhibits/electric-dress

The Know-it-all Knitting Bag

This is an amazing use of the Arduino LilyPad created by Kalani Craig..."It knows your row number, the chart for your stitch pattern, and where you are in that stitch pattern."

See the detailed instructions on how to make your own bag at http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEss10/PATTknowitall.php  with a link to a YouTube video. Photos are posted on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/10754648@N08/sets/72157623477844329/

Also visit http://www.hapagirl.com/2010/03/21/a-geeks-paradise-the-know-it-all-knitting-bag/ for the bakcstory of the bag.

Specialty Fabrics Review reports on NSF Grant

Specialty Fabrics Review
January 2010
Creating computational textiles

It’s called a LilyPad Arduino, and designer Leah Buechley and a team of educators and scientists plan to show more than 400 students how to combine it with traditional fabric arts to create computational textiles—computers embedded into fabrics. Buechley, director of the “High-Low Tech Group” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, developed the LilyPad Arduino microcontroller board, which has electronic parts that can be sewn onto clothing to project light, produce sound or perform other technical operations.

The National Science Foundation provided a three-year grant to bring scientists and art educators from Indiana University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania together to blend learning and creativity. The grant team will bring aspects of physics, engineering, computer programming, art, clothing design and fabrication skills into after-school educational settings. LilyPad Arduinos have been used to program built-in turn signals on a biking jacket, a sewing machine that can be used as a printer and an exhibit simulating the experience of being inside a human body.
http://specialtyfabricsreview.com/articles/0110_sw3_textiles.html

LilyPad Interactive Passion Sensing Scarf

www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Lilypad-Interactive-Pass...

The LilyPad Interactive Passion Sensing Scarf works like so:

Scarf number one being worn by someone walking alone will light up with the color Blue for Lonely. When the wearer of scarf number two joins up with number one, the two scarves will sense each other and then light up Red for Love.

Future plans for capacitance touch: which will allow the colors to Pulsate for Passion if one wearer touches the other wearers scarf.