Poking Around Textiles With Your Multimeter

Looking for a fun wearable electronics project? While you can buy specific fabric and conductive thread for your projects, sometimes you can even find conductive fabric where you might not expect it!

In this latest video by Adafruit, [Becky Stern] goes undercover at a fabrics store with her trusty multimeter to find some new material that can be used for electronics projects! While pickings are slim, she made some useful discoveries — most metallic fabrics aren’t conductive, but some are — You’ll definitely need to take your multimeter with you.

Another funny quirk is that some fabrics are only conductive in one direction! Which could make for a really cool project that seemingly defies conventional wiring — or you can sew a conductive thread perpendicular to the continuity to connect it all together.

Of course if you wanna get really fancy you could make a fabric speaker… or even a fabric display!

21 thoughts on “Poking Around Textiles With Your Multimeter

  1. You just need the right equipment. With a Megohmmeter, most fabrics are conductive, plain cotton was measured by me in the 100 GOhm range (with probes a few cm apart)

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