As much as I love my little bear, it’s time for some more variety in LED embroidery kit options.

Isn't he cute?

I’m turning to you to help me decide which constellation I should make available next. Between now and February 28, Like Polymath Design Lab on facebook and leave a comment on this facebook post with the constellation you’d most like to see as the next Sewing Electrified LED embroidery kit.

The person who suggests the constellation I choose will win one of the new kits once it has been developed. If multiple people suggest the winning constellation, the winner will be drawn at random from all of those who suggested it.

I’ll also be drawing a second winner at random from everyone who suggests a constellation, for $15 credit at my etsy shop.

Please, no more than 2 suggestions/entries per person. And good luck!

A recent addition to Polymath Design Lab’s offering is the Sewing Electrified line of electronic sewing kits. I’m really excited about these kits, and I’ve heard great things back from the people who have tried them out so far.

Touch Screen Glove Kits

I’ve started things off with a kit to make gloves that work with iPhones and other gadgets with capacitive touch screens, and a constellation embroidery kit that lights up with LEDs. One of my goals is to help make the field of eTextiles more accessible, so both of these kits have been designed to be easy enough for someone with little to no experience with either sewing or electronics.

The kits are available online – or if you’re in Seattle, you can pick one up in person at Ada’s Technical Books.

LED Embroidery kits

I love this Little Dipper / Ursa Minor pattern, but I still want to expand the options for the LED embroidery kits. Stay tuned for a contest coming up to help me decide which other constellations come next.

I also finished a major site redesign this weekend  - more flexibility for the win! There are a few new sections, so feel free to poke around. Oh, and let me know if you find anything misbehaving!

Ada Lovelace Day was established last year as an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. If you’re not already familiar with Lady Ada, it’s worth learning more… The daughter of Lord Byron, she worked with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine and wrote the world’s first computer program.

In honor of Lady Ada, I’d like to highlight a handful of the women who inspire me in the world of wearable electronics and soft circuitry.

Leah Buechley

Director of the High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab, Leah developed the Lilypad Arduino – the microcontroller boards I’ve been using in my own wearable electronics experimentation. It’s a dream of mine to someday be involved with her lab – they come up with incredible, innovative, and beautiful things there!

LED Bracelet - Leah Buechley, 2005

Hannah Perner-Wilson

One of the graduate research assistants in Leah Buechley’s lab, Hannah has developed some incredible resources for others interested in wearable electronics, including the reference site HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT (with Mika Satomi) and a bunch of Instructables.

Knit & Crocheted Sensors - Hannah Perner-Wilson, 2009

Diana Eng

You may recognize Diana‘s name from her stint on Project Runway a couple of years ago. She’s still going strong with wearable technology -  most recently authoring Fashion Geek and creating Fairytale Fashion, a collection with electronics and shape-changing garments which integrated feedback from the public through her website during the design process. For extra geek points, she also covers ham radio for Make magazine!

Twinkle Dress and EL Wire Dress - Diana Eng, 2010

Syuzi Pakhchyan

Syuzi wrote Fashioning Technology, the first book that I picked up on the subject of soft circuitry, and runs a community by the same name. Syuzi is great about encouraging more people to experiment in the field – the Fashioning Tech community is very welcoming, and she regularly shares the projects that members blog about there.

ePuppets - Syuzi Pakhchyan, 2008

Alison Lewis

Alison is the founder of SWITCH and author of SwitchCraft. She also teaches at the Parsons School of Design, and brings a more high-fashion perspective to her work. I was incredibly flattered when she recently featured my Skirt Full of Stars on SWITCH.

Rodarte-style Lighted Heels - Alison Lewis, 2010

Becky Stern

Becky may have done more to spread the word of DIY soft circuitry than anyone else. As Associate Editor at MAKE and CRAFT, she frequently shares wearable tech projects and has produced a couple of CRAFT videos about wearables. She also teaches soft circuit workshops (I had to miss the one at Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle last summer because I didn’t have anyone else working my booth), and sells soft circuit starter kits through her company, Sternlab.

Lilypad Embroidery - Becky Stern, 2008

Lynne Bruning

‘Textile Enchantress’ Lynne makes absolutely stunning garments that frequently involve things like electronics or UV-reactive materials. She has also generously shared quite a few instructables of soft circuitry techniques. I’m particularly fascinated by the work she’s been doing using smart fashion to assist impaired individuals – like this sonar garment for the visually impaired.

Bats Have Feelings Too - Lynne Bruning, 2009

Angela Sheehan

Creator of the blog Soft Circuit Saturdays, Angela is another maker who has been diving deeply into wearable electronics. I love seeing what another dedicated explorer who is not a professional in the field comes up with!

Temperature Sensing Cup Sleeve - Angela Sheehan, 2009

Interested in seeing more posts honoring women in science and tech? Check out the list of posts over at Finding Ada, or follow the #ald10 tag on twitter.

Now you can see the Skirt Full of Stars in action!

In case you haven’t seen my last post about it, this is a hand-sewn tulle wrap skirt with integrated fiber optics and lights that change color in response to the speed and direction of the wearer’s movement.

It uses the Lilypad Arduino platform, developed for integrating electronics into textiles. There’s a purple organza underlayer to the skirt onto which is sewn the Lilypad main circuit board and a power supply, and an accelerometer hangs from a ribbon to allow for freedom of movement. The Lilypad receives the measurements of the accelerometer’s movement, and translates them into color output for the tricolor LEDs around the waistband of the skirt.

I used sparkle fiber optic cable to cut the harsh quality that you can get when using LEDs and distribute the light more evenly throughout the skirt. In previous prototypes I had simply created a line of LEDs swirling around the skirt, and this makes for a far more subtle and wearable effect.

I have to say, getting decent video of this skirt was quite a challenge! Too much light and the fiber optics didn’t show up on camera, too little and nothing showed up at all. Even this isn’t an accurate representation of what it looks like in person – the camera mostly just picks up the points of light from fiber optics pointed directly at it, where in person you can see them all around the skirt. But hopefully it at least gives a decent idea of how the whole thing works…

Want your own?

It looks like I’ll be making another of these soon, so I plan to take more photos of the construction process and post the instructions here as I go.

If you’re not feeling the yearning to jump into making wearable electronics yourself but you still want your own, send me an email at shannon@polymathdesignlab.com. I had a lot of fun creating this and would be thrilled to make some as custom projects.

Hooray, Hooray – it’s finally done!

Introducing my ‘Skirt Full of Stars’ – an interactive, illuminated skirt using the Lilypad Arduino – a microcontroller board designed for textile use.  The skirt incorporates an accelerometer to measure the wearer’s movement, and the ‘stars’ change color based on that movement.

I’ve been working on this skirt for around a year now – you may remember the video I posted last spring of my proof of concept circuit. In the time since then I’ve created two other prototype skirts, which were great steps in my learning but didn’t end up working quite as I’d hoped. This one, however, made it though a full real-world test wear at last week’s Bassnectar concert with flying, or at least dancing, colors.

Here’s what that circuit from the video ended up turning into:

And here it is showing a different color as I move the accelerometer:

I sewed the circuit into a handmade tulle wrap skirt, then attached fiber optics to each of the LEDs and wove them through the lower layer of tulle.

I’m hoping to get some better pictures and some video of it this weekend, so stay tuned for more details.

It was quite a busy couple of days at Chez Polymath. We kicked things off with a WOMP at the Bassnectar concert at the Crystal Ballroom on Friday night. Can I just say that the Crystal’s floating floor is a lot of fun in a giant crowd of people bouncing and dancing their butts off? Actually, I can do just slightly better than that… here’s a very short video that includes some footage of the show. In fact, if you look closely you can even see Sean and I in the Portland segment!

I finished sewing everything together on the motion-responsive light-up skirt an hour or two before the concert started. Turns out that this particular iteration has some bugs – the first LED lights up SUPER-BRIGHT while the rest go between being either dim or off entirely. I was having trouble with the conductive thread shorting right at the LEDs (the leads are very close together) and with the level of resistance I was getting from the thread, so I actually set the skirt I had been working on aside and made another using ribbon cable (gained by cutting up an old floppy-drive cable) to make the connections. I think that this caused the problems… there were some issues with the stability of the conductive-thread-to-ribbon-cable connection (since I still used the conductive thread between the various boards and between the board and first LED), and not enough resistance in the re-done version. However, it worked well enough for me to wear, and I had a lot of fun with it. I consider this one to be a proof of concept, and will be refining from here. I just ordered a handful of the actual lilypad RGB LEDs to see if the connection placement works better for me than it did on the standard RGB LEDs I have been working with.

Saturday mostly consisted of sleeping in and getting all of the finishing touches done for Crafty Wonderland on Sunday. Even with the time I took off work last week to get ready I hadn’t gotten my sign done, so I changed the plans for that too. I had been planning to use the laser to cut my logo out of some fabric with fusible (iron-on) backing, and then apply it to another piece of fabric, but that seems a bit complex for a last minute thing – especially dealing with getting everything lined up right, so I ended up just printing it on 11×17 paper at Kinkos and backing it with some larger black mat board, and it looked fab. Wouldn’t hold up for anything outdoors, but it was great for an inside show. And now I’m thinking that I may actually try Spoonflower (the print on demand fabric service) when the time comes to put together a more permanent and outdoor-friendly booth sign.

Crafty Wonderland on Sunday was a lot of fun.  I meant to get pictures of my table and displays, but sadly I kept forgetting until highly inconvenient times, so that will have to wait for the next show. Anyway, everyone was very friendly and I got a lot of really great response to both my items and my displays. I ended up in a booth between Barbara of B. Hive Designs and Cate of Bee’s Knees Industries, both of whom were great neighbors. I even ended up trading with Barbara for a gorgeous new shirt, lucky me! And, it looks like I’ll have some more news to share soon that came out of Crafty Wonderland, but I don’t want to say anything until everything’s finalized, so you’ll just have to sit tight on that one until next week.

Oh, and I wanted to mention the photo on this entry – it’s one of my new set of laser cut acrylic bowls, heat formed by hand – this one is based on one form of diatom, a type of tiny algae with intricate, porous silicate cell walls.  It was my entry into the Mad Scientists of Etsy April challenge (theme: Cretaceous) because diatoms first appear in the fossil record when the developed their characteristic cell walls in the early Cretaceous period. MSOE is now running a contest for each monthly challenge, and I’d love if you’d stop by the blog and vote for my entry! Of course, you can also buy the bowl – available through both Etsy and Ponoko.

Lilypad Arduino prototype circuit from Shannon Henry on Vimeo.

(for more about what you are watching, see:  A working prototype!)

How exciting! Pictured here is a functioning prototype for the motion sensing skirt that I’ve been planning. It uses a Lilypad Arduino, a microcontroller board designed specifically for use in textile electronics. The lilypad board takes readings from an accelerometer (the small board in the upper right of the photo) and translates information about the movement it is sensing into different colors of light from the RGB LEDs at the bottom.

Ok, so I know this doesn’t translate all that well to a still photo. I tried to take a video of it working, but my little point and shoot doesn’t handle the LED very well for videos – they made streaks all over the screen. I’ll see if I can get over to my parents’ house tomorrow and talk my little sister into playing videographer for me, though. In the meantime, I’m off to work more on the final design.