Machine embroidered LED matrix

posted Jul 16th 2008 9:50pm by
filed under: misc hacks


Our favorite electric textiles expert, [Leah Buechley], put together this machine embroidered LED matrix proof of concept. For the vertical rows, the top thread is conductive, while the thread on the underside (the bobbin) is not. For the horizontal rows, the the thread is swapped and the fabric acts as an insulator between the two layers of wiring. You can see a small brown bunch of thread next to each LED: this is the via to wiring on the backside of the fabric. The matrix is being controlled by a LilyPad Arduino. This is an interesting idea and has the potential to make prototyping wearable projects much faster. Here are two more pictures of the project.



4 Responses to Machine embroidered LED matrix

  • johnny says:

    this is great. Siegfried and Roy will be very excited about these developments.

  • aXit says:

    Can the lillypad boards send out signals at say, 50Hz? So you could form images that look fine to the human eye, rather than just single LEDs flashing in a sequence?

  • Yale says:

    I posted this on the Flickr page too, but I think this should be combined with Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Peggy 2.0.

  • eric says:

    Wearer beware! You may get hit by flying electrons!! http://www.ultracad.com/articles/flying.htm
    I jest, this lilypad stuff is neat ;)

  • Leave a Reply

    XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

    Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web as well as hacking related news.

    Send us your hacks










         




    Hacks

    Resources