week three

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1. what did you do?

Finally decided exactly what I wanted to do.  The lights on the dress will beat to the music or noise around it.  I ordered three 3m long el wire and three 10 foot long strings of led lights. This will allow me to program all six strings of light to respond to different volumes of sound.

I ordered all of my supplies.  It should arrive by next Friday so I can start programing on Friday.

2. problems

the el wire needs to go through an inverter so it was just an extra cost, but that is minor.

3. successes

I finally ordered everything that i need so i can get going on programing

4. Schedule

next week I will begin programing and continue pattering.  I feel behind because i just ordered my supplies but I’m hoping that because I combined this final project with another class I will have plenty of time to devote to this project and can start making better progress.

Week 2

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1. What did you do?

  • Calculated yardage estimate for dress
  • Researched large-scale felting techniques
  • Calculated approximate felt shrinkage
  • Ordered pre-felts
  • Ordered wool dye

2. Problems

  • My LEDs still have not arrived, even though they have been listed as “shipped”.  I’m waiting to hear back from the company on where they are

3.Successes

  • I found a few time and effort saving techniques for felting that I think will aid me on creating my yardage successfully.

4. Schedule?

  • I feel like I’m still alright on my schedule.  I have all of my materials on the way and a good plan on how to proceed.

5. Next Week?

  • The most important task for this next week to complete draping/patterning the dress.
  • If the supplies arrive, I would also like to purchase my wool roving and dye it in preparation for felting.

 

Week 1 Catch-up Post

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Week 1 was spent researching LEDs and testing randomized lighting code.  I think I have a good start on the coding end.  I ordered 400 of the below LED’s:

http://www.ledssuperbright.com/5mm-led-c-6/100-5mm-flat-white-led-20000-mcd-p-193

Next steps – once I have the LED’s I want to check their actual brightness to determine how many LED’s I’ll be stringing per “cloud” so that I can make some determinations on power needs.  I also need to finalize a plan as far as how I’m going to connect all of these LED’s to an Arduino (multiplexing, shift registers, different board type, etc.).

 

Week 2 – Update

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This week:

  • Received the fabric, pulse sensor, and LEDs
  • Made alterations to the jacket made of muslin (from week 1)
  • Cut the pattern for the jacket out of the new fabric
  • Determined the number of LEDs (from string lights) needed for the jacket and how they would be positioned on the jacket
  • Ordered the proximity sensor and new LEDs

Problems:

  • The LEDs I ordered (luckily only $0.50) were too large so I am purchasing smaller ones.
  • I am not sure if the LED string lights will work after cutting them.  (Emelia sent sparkfun’s tech support an e-mail)

Successes:

  • Determined which proximity sensor to order.  Looking at an adafruit tutorial with Kevin, it seems as though the proximity sensor won’t be too difficult to get working, especially since they provided an example code. (woohoo!)
  • With alterations, the jacket seems more shapely.
  • Discussed with Emelia some options for attaching the LED string lights to the jacket using reflective ribbon.

I am on schedule and hope to get most the jacket sown and start attaching the LED string lights by next week. 

Moneo: Day 10

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Parts on Order

  • Soldering Iron + Tip
  • Solder
  • Wireless Modules
  • Pack of extra MicroSD cards

Parts Received

  • 41 gauge copper wire

Work Completed

  • Completed trial circuit with Teensy and MicroSD card reader. Successfully ran code to list files on card. [Image Forthcoming]
  • Spun copper wire into a 5-ply copper thread for connecting components [Image Forthcoming]

Prospects

Still looking good. There has been some delay with a few parts and timing may become tight if I need to order shielding fabrics, but overall I’m happy with the progress. The spun copper wire should solve the potential problem of fuzzy conductive thread shorting out nearby holds on the PCBs. Still need to determine how to wire up the wireless modules.

I’ve decided to use the VCard standard for holding the business cards. Its well supported and small, so it should be fine for storing and transmitting. Next week will see more software development on this end, but it will be difficult to get a good sense of it all until the transmitters arrive.

week 2

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this week i awaited the arrival of materials mostly

using the multimeter and pool sample water, it was determined that my current design will not short

I have selected a fabric, but have not yet ordered it

kevin directed me to think about programming even if i didn’t have my accelerometer, and so i problem-solved the coding a little bit

main problem is not having the materials yet and the main success was finding out that water doesn’t conduct the way originally thought over a distance so that was a step in the right direction.

i am behind

next week i plan to start using my accelerometer to collect data that i can really hash out the coding with

Week 2 – progress report

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  • What did you do this week? [Include image(s)]
  1. Got all the material
  2. tested the screen
  3. tested the android toolkit and paired it up with arduino BT.
  4. tested the QTC material (res: 25 ohm – 1.5K ohm)
  • Describe the problems you encountered
  1. still we have a little problem for sending command from android to arduino
  • Describe the successes you had
  1. Android toolkit installed successfully
  2. Screen
  • Are you on schedule?
  1. sort of, we kind of jump to the second milestone 
  • What do you plan to do next week?
  1. will embed the QTC inside the PDMS
  2. working/coding for both android and arduino part
  3. starting to embed the LEDs inside the gloves

 

 

 

Week 2

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talked to Kevin about how to hook up my EL wire to the Arduino to allow for multiple strands of EL wire to be hooked up.

played around with style lines on the dress form to see how far three meters would get me.  What you see is three meters, so I will need at lease 6 more meters to get the look I was going for.

this is what the style lines look like under fabric.  I’m just playing around with different look.

where all the hardware will be hidden.

Successes:

got the EL wire to light up and played around with a couple of style lines

Problems:

Realizing that there will be more bulk than I was hoping for in the back of the dress but hopefully that will be covered by the fullness in the train.

Schedule:

I am behind schedule, but hopefully I can pick things up in this coming week.

 

 

moving forward:

-keep patterning

-figure out how much EL wire I will need.

-Figure out how I will make the lights flash to the beat of music using a sound sensor.