Custom Flex Sensors

flex

Flex sensors, like the ones used in the Nintendo Power Glove, are generally expensive and hard to find. However, [jiovine] demonstrates that they are easy enough to make from spare parts. He sandwiched a strip of plastic from ESD bags between pieces of copper foil, and wrapped the whole thing in heat shrink tubing. The sensor is able to detect bends in either direction, unlike the original power glove sensors. His version had a nominal resistance of about 20k ohms, but by choosing a different resistive layer you could create sensors that are more or less resistive.

Related: 5-cent tilt sensor

14 thoughts on “Custom Flex Sensors

  1. Seconded. As soon as I clear space on my desk! lol

    I actually have some 12×18″ sheets of pyralux that I got from DuPont as an engineering sample. There’s really no reason you couldn’t etch traces from the end of the ‘sensor’ strip and stick it in an FPC/FFC connector.

    (And people think I’m nutsy for actually desoldering those from boards! “It’s not like you can make your own flex circuits.” “Oh yeah? Watch me.”)

  2. Oh awesome, I’ve been wanting a good way to make these. The only alternatives I’d seen looked way too flimsy or too cost prohibitive considering the ghetto nature.

    Will definitely be trying this.

  3. Instructables now tries to force you to sign up and in to view a lot of stuff like secondary pictures, I don’t like them anymore because of that.
    It’s a pity since that kind of stuff is so uncalled for.

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