Day 2 at the Worklab: Interactive textiles and how textiles visualize the environment and power my mobile.
We received a deeper briefing upon Arduino and soft circuits done with the Arduino Board or a Lilipad.(www.arduino.cc) by Riccardo. The Lilypad is concepted to be used in textile/wearable surrounding and is invented by Leah Buechley (http://thehighlowtech.com/). You can attach the Lilipad with conductive wires/yarn upon your textile and it can even handle a careful handwash (take out the power supply! first).
The difference of a Lilypad to an Arduino Board is that it has no on/off connector and has an external USB interface and connector. They both usually run with 5V (Lilypad from 2,7V), exactly the amount provided by your computer when you connect it via USB. After you uploaded the program you created on arduino software, you can unplugg the board and it runs the program you loaded (it is saved on the chip). Difference to an Arduino to a Lillypad is, that you can push the restart button mounted on the pad, the program will start from the beginning. You can attach several microcontrollers, like accelerometers (movement sensors), heat sensors, light sensors, LED´s etc. If your are a green minded person, I recommend powering the board with a rechargeable lithium battery, or by solarcells. Be aware, when working with el-textiles it requires that you – before touching processors and your arduino boards, etc, that you touch metal. You will get rid of your electrical charge/voltage – that can destroy your electronic hardware.
When writing programs with the arduino software, you need to define wether you want your board to be an Input, or an Output to tell via your board what you want it to do (to turn sth on or off – a reaction).
An Lilypad/and Arduino is capturing what the sensors are sensing from the surrounding (via light, heat, motion, touch etc ). We got an insight in different ways of sensing the environment, the digital (simply on and off information – to bring an LED to blink (0 and 1)) and the analog (a fading LED from on to fading off). We explored and made tests with different textile sensors like the soft textile touch button (you can buy at PlugAndWear – this sensor works very nice just by a gently touch, almost stroke, I really liked that one) and a sensor called potentiometer, here you can slide for example a bead along a conductive material (we used a knitted tube produced with metalthread and textile yarn (PlugAndWear) to control the intensity of a LED blink (fast or slow).
After this lecture it was time to begin with brainstorm for our project that the team will produce the next 2 days. To get into the right creative productive mood the Team of Diffus showed us again some examples of interactives projects with the focus of kinetic sculptures and responsive spaces.
In fact one of the first kinetic sculptures run by solarenergy was done by Charles Eames, called The do nothing machine, 1957.
Referred Artists: Scenocosme (http://www.scenocosme.com/), http://undertheumbrella.net/, Daniel Chadwick, Meridith Pingree, Jason Bruges, Philips Lumiblade, Random International (http://www.random-international.com/), Art+Com BMW museum.
Brainstorm briefing: Our input for the project are solar cells sensors analog and digital, on/off potentiometer, photo transistors. We will use Arduino as a processing tool, and the Output will be LED´s, motors and heat. The theme will be to transform sunshine, emotional expressions, relationship between us and our objects, body and movements and space. Slogan: What you see is what you get!
The group made brainstorm, and after 1 hour extensive talk we came to the solution that it would be nice to use thermochromic color (pigments you mix into transparent binder) (to order for example at (http://www.zenit-konst.se/Servlet), contact microphones (piezos), miniloudspeakers, our solar cells and to make something where people can interact – with the textile and the space.