Electrotextiles!

My current project for Uni is all about electro-textiles and creating road safety gear for children/teenagers. It's proving to be immensely interesting, horrendously easy to get side tracked and ridiculously hard to think up something that doesn't already exist... The world of material technology is ever fascinating so here are a few interesting projects =D

 

The M-dress mobile phone, no more missing calls because you have no pockets in your dress! You put the sim card into a slot in the dress and your dress becomes your phone... Missing someone? send them a bluetooth hug with the hug-shirt which uses bluetooth phone messaging to send a replication of your hug to someone you miss... Of course, I couldn't avoid a bit of knitting geekery, a scarf made using the encoding on a magnetic strip from a credit card, fed through a knitting machine.

To help us out with our electro-textile projects my tutor gave me these to play around with, a few bits and bobs from the PICaxe range. For whatever reason, she can't programme the wee chip in the middle so nothing would work.

I've figured out that, at the very least, the power supply and LED contacts and components work so the solder hasn't degraded. However, due to my Fruit I'm unable to actually programme anything! Mac's don't have the right data port for the conventional cable and don't support the recommended software, so I thought I was being all clever by using an ipod cable to link all the bits together and using a freeware download but apparently all you get is a surge of current, which shuts down your usb port... woops! It's a good thing Mac's are so clever and that i didn't just break everything. I'll have to try it tomorrow in the labs.

The idea ultimately is to create something for children/teenagers to wear to make them more visible when they are walking home from school/sports clubs. The biggest problem is coming up with something new that kids would actually wear.... The easiest bit is trawling the internet looking at loads of cool applications of electronics in clothing =D My Delicious page is now thoroughly plastered with silly links to fashion technology pages!