Electronic Textile Bag

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an electronic textile bag, to be used in the context of educational activities on electronics and coding.

To create your own e-textile bag, you will need:

• 1x soldering iron
• needles and thread
• conductive thread (about 13 meters)
• 2mm thick textile (or thinner)
• 1x Led
• 1x 8ohm speaker
• 1x mini vibrating motor
• 1x photoresistor
• 1x textile bag
• 1x Arduino board + power cable 6x jumper wires
• 6x small safety pins (around 4cm long)
• 9x metal snap buttons (make sure they are not coated and are conductive)
• 1x 1kohm resistor
• 1x 250 ohm resistor (or similar)
• electric wire (about 1 meter)

One of the patches must be slightly bigger than the other 3.

Shorten the longer leg of the Led and solder a 250ohm resistor to its end.

Insert both legs of the Led into the textile patch. Do not leave any space between the textile patch and the base of the Led.

Sew the bottom part of two snap buttons to the textile patch. These will serve to connect the legs of the Led.

Solder both legs of the Led to the snap buttons

Apply the same procedure as the one described above, to create the patches for the 8ohm speaker as well as the one for the mini vibrating motor.

You may need to use some electric wire to extend the terminals of the electronic components and be able to solder them to the snap buttons.

Neither the mini vibrating motor nor the speaker need a resistor.

Use the biggest textile patch for the photoresistor.

First insert both legs of the photoresistor into the textile patch.

Then start the soldering. Solder a 1kohm resistor as well as a piece of electric wire to the negative leg of the photoresistor (the shorter of the two legs).

Position all 4 patches on the front of the textile bag, and draw lines with a pencil, to determine where you will be sewing the conductive thread, and where you will position the arduino board. This will also give you a rough idea of how much conductive thread you will need to use to connect all patches to the board.

All negatives will be connected together by a piece of conductive thread which will run from one side of the bag to the other, and which finally reach the board.

Draw with a pencil the position where the snap buttons will need to be attached to the textile bag, then sew them to the bag.

Remember that the photoresistor patch will need 3 snap buttons, whereas all other patches will need only two.

Once all snap buttons are in place you need to make all necessary connections using the conductive thread

Start by sewing the wire that connects all negatives together.

At the end of each conductive thread, you will need to attach a safety pin. This will be soldered to a jumper wire which will eventually connect the conductive thread to the Arduino board.