Illuminate - a Social Garment

In my fashion tech projects, I am always inspired by social interaction with a strong visual impact. Since my background was in visual design, I enjoy bringing a strong visual impact into the interaction designs of my garments. This garment highlights a physical interaction by illuminating the area when touched.

This instructable walks you through my process of creating this garment from concept mood board to creating the circuit design. You can also see the garment on my website here.

When I propose to any organization about what I want to create, a mood board made of sketches, inspiration images, and any quick prototype images. This helps me to visualize my design concept

When you are ready to tackle the code that drives the interaction. Download my sample code here on GitHub. Then put the electronic components together like this. You will need the following components:

1. Adafruit Flora $14.95 X1 ( This is the micro controller that will be acting as the brain of the garment. This controller tells the LEDs when to turn on and off. See a tutorial here about how to set up the micro controller by codebender_cc. )

2. Adafruit 12-Key capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout $7.95 X1 ( This is the nerve endings of the garment. These capacitive touch sensor breakout boards can tell when you touch the pins with your fingers and then send that information to the micro controller. See a tutorial about the capacitive touch sensor here on Adafruit learn.)

3. Adafruit LED Sequins - Warm White - Pack of 5 $3.95 X 8 (LEDs are light emitting diodes. They will light up your garment. See the spec sheet of these LEDs here.)

4. 74HC595 Shift Register - Pack of 3 $2.75 X1 ( Even though we only need one shift register in the garment. It is nice to have two extra ones in case anything happens)

5. Lithium Ion Battery - 3.7v 2000mAh $12.50 ( Without the battery, nothing will happen to the garment. These lithium batteries are fairly light for your garment. They are great and rechargeable without adding too much weight. )

Connecting wires with jumper wires to test out if they are working. Here is my code:

Once you are done testing the micro controller, shift register and capacitive touch sensor on the breadboard and you know its working. You can solder them together with wires and solder led. You can see a comprehensive solder tutorial here by noahw.

You can see on the diagram, there is the back side of my garment design pattern. I have decided that my circuits live on the inside of this pattern so that the circuits doesn't interfere with the capacitive touch on the outside of the garment.

Please note that the connection pins are marked on the previous step for Flora.

You can follow a similar design as my garment or you can create your own! I sometimes wear gloves to cut my patterns when the fabrics I uses are white. However this is not something you have to you.

My LED trimmings are made of three layers.

1. The reflective nylon trimming you can purchase in fashion supply stores.

2. Conductive fabric tape sold by Tinker Sphere in New York City. You can also find other suppliers online.

3. Lastly the sewable LEDs in white sold by Adafruit.

I have included 5 strips of LED trimming onto my garment. You can add as many as the amount of capacitive touch sensor pins you have.

I have added an extra layer of neon fabric between my conductive fabric tape and my garment to create a visual cure for people to know where to touch.

You can do the same or directly peel the back of the conductive fabric tape and tape the ideal length onto your garment.

Before you sew all the LED trimming onto the individual touch panels, make sure to test if all of your LEDs are working. It would be harder to take LEDs off once you have sewed the trimming onto the garment panels. You can use your zipper footer so that you don't get stuck by the LEDs.

Since this is a general description of making an interactive garment. I am not going to list all the steps of constructing a garment. This also entirely depends on your own design.

Once you have tested your circuit that you have solder together, hand sew the circuit onto the back pattern of your garment to make sure that they are secure and won't fall off. Make sure to test the circuit again after you have sewed the core components onto the back pattern.

Make sure to add a layer between the circuit and the wearer's back so that the wearer's back doesn't accidentally turn on all the lights. This also helps to protect your circuit.

Voila!

Hopefully, your design is working the first time when you connect everything together. If it is not, don't worry, you can test all the connections with a multimeter and debug step by step.