A Yarn About Microcontrollers And Textile Projects

Yesterday’s post on this blog was about the Tetris Shirt, a textile computing project. Today’s post will follow up on that topic with a couple related ideas and articles.

Conductive yarn

First up is the primary focus of the post -- ‘smart yarn. A few days ago I read a Wired article titled "This Smart Yarn Makes Gadget Interactions Magical." The article discusses a relatively unique approach to textile computing projects. This novel type of yarn combines conductive steel fiber and non-conductive yarn fiber.

"A new project from Royal College of Art student Yen Chen Chang explores what happens when you replace glass, metal and plastic with textile control mechanisms. The result? A totally new way to interact with our everyday devices. Using conductive yarn made from 80 percent polyester and 20 percent stainless steel...Chang knit and crocheted a series of

objects that control devices by pulling, squeezing and stroking. When manipulated, the overlap of the metal fiber causes the textile to change conductivity which is then measured by an Arduino and communicated to the gadgets...Chang developed the

Squeezy Juicer, a juicer that only works when you squeeze an oversized knit ball between two people. The faster you squish the ball, the quicker you’ll have your orange juice...“When you integrate different sensing technology into today’s electronics, you can make something look totally different,” he says."

Dezeens article explains how Changs conductive yarn came to be.

"Knit Sensors was Yen Chen Changs graduation project from the Design Products course at Londons RCA, and involved experimenting with conductive textiles to provide a more tangible alternative to touch screens and other typical interfaces...The designer began his project by exploring the possibility of knitting standard electrical cables into self-supporting structures, which he realised generated a small amount of resistance because of the complexity of their intertwined surfaces. Recognising that manipulating the surfaces affected the amount of resistance, Chang began to explore the possibility of weaving with conductive yarns connected to sensors that translate actions like stretching and pulling into voltage changes."

Yarn glove electronics

Two other websites to look at if this yarn is of interest to you are the alphafit and Eeonyx sites. The alphafit technology involves pressure sensitive textiles. The company states:

"For the first time it is now possible...to measure surface pressure on three-dimensional variable surfaces. The filament itself measures the pressure. We have developed a textile system that works without the need of inserting any industrial sensors. This measurement system can be integrated into any textile."

Eeonyx makes an electronics-friendly yarn that is says consists of,

"...a conductive polymer coated yarn with precisely tunable electrical resistance and excellent uniformity of linear resistance. EeonYarn™ is durable, able to stand up to real world conditions of abrasion and repeated washings. Applications for EeonYarn™ include radar absorbing fabrics and composites, resistive fabric heaters, and woven pressure sensors."

Adafruit tilt sensor

More readily available, or maybe lower cost, textile microcontroller (MCU) project supplies and techniques are described in Adafruits datasheet titled "Handcrafting Textile Sensors From Scratch." This PDF document shows a whole slew of supplies and tools for textile sensor projects. It shows the basics of making textile sensors such as a pressure sensor matrix and a tilt sensor. A worthwhile read for someone interested in textile computing projects. Another great background guide for this topic is Katies "Soft Electronics Tutorial."

Two other random textile computing items Ill throw in here at the end are the Lilypad Arduino, an alternative to the Adafruit FLORA mentioned in yesterdays blog post, and ChipChicks article titled "Dragon Inspired Outfit Hits the Fashionware Runway Show" which has some pretty interesting projects. The Lilypad has been used in many projects -- just Google   Lilypad project   and youll find more wearable computing projects than you have time to read about. The ChipChick article, although not solely about MCU fashion items, does talk about relevant products, saying:

"CE Week may be over but the fashion will always live on. A one stop shop for NY’s geek-erati, but this year they got treated to a bit of high fashion as well. The runway show combined wearable fitness, one of a kind high tech fashion design, robotics, and program for young kids...The Dragon Queen is a collaborative design evolved from Victoria Secret Wings...The dragon interacts with the audience through a mobile app that controls its movement through WiFi.

Lilypad Arduino

The dragon’s power comes from a combination of an EZ robot controller, a speaker, 3D printed eyes, and LED strip lights...Strokes and Dots is an outfit inspired by early modern art but it combines speed, graphic design and technology. The LEDs woven into the fabric are motion and sound responsive..."

The textile computing world is big and getting bigger every day! What project would you like to do with fabrics and microcontrollers? If you do a lot of fabric work and want help with the microcontroller or electronics part of your project, consider coming to a Humboldt Microcontrollers Group meeting and explaining what youd like to do. Or ask questions you have about how MCUs work or what their capabilities are. Well do our best to help you out, and it might result in you heading out into a whole new world of fabric projects.

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Spark io Raises 4 9 Million Lessons For Humboldt County

Spark Core

Spark.io just raised $4.9 million to hire more employees, increase the usefulness and user base of its cloud-based Spark OS platform, and increase its market presence and penetration. Microcontrollers (MCUs) were a key component of Sparks first product, Spark Core. Spark Core would be useless without the MCU, and knowing how to use and program the MCU was key to the early success of the product.

Can Humboldt County learn anything from the Spark.io story and replicate Sparks success? Yes, it can. Heres why and how.

Humboldts small town atmosphere, access to a beautiful natural environment, and the isolated, pastoral landscape which inspires creativity combine to provide a quality of life that attracts highly talented people to the area. However, Humboldt doesnt have a national or global reputation as a high-profile innovation community or a thriving high-tech business ecosystem. This means Humboldt MCU developers and entrepreneurs need to focus on the right things to be financially sustainable and have a chance for Spark-like success.

The highly talented people in Humboldt County who focus on the following six principles put themselves in a position to succeed like Spark did.

1. Engage in emerging technologies and sectors. (While the focus is on long term technologies, be conscious of low entry cost opportunities which take advantage of short term trends. Italics edit on July 20.)
2. Focus on interesting platforms that have high market potential.
3. Build a core network of people, both in and outside of Humboldt County, who are passionate and highly skilled and are focusing those passionate skills on developing disruptive innovations in emerging technologies and sectors.
4. Have a physical presence both in Humboldt and in a leading US location for the subject technology or sector.
5. Use Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Tindie and other appropriate high-profile sites to launch products, determine mass appeal, gain funding, gain visibility.
6. Build a network of support resources that allows long term serious product and platform development and insightful pivoting.

Only a small percentage of independent developers and startups who build and launch products and

companies will create a sustainable revenue stream, and even fewer will be as successful as Spark has been so far. However, talented people who successfully focus on the above six principles have a much greater chance of success than those who dont leverage those principles.

If youre interested in the Spark story and want more background, check out the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), TechCrunch (TC) and BusinessInsider (BI). According to the WSJ, "Spark.io “empowers engineers” by letting them create and improve products without relying on technology, features and access afforded to them by large companies...Having recently moved his

Spark Core breadboard circuit

business from Minneapolis to San Francisco, Mr. Supalla plans to use Spark.io’s freshly-raised capital on hiring, community-building and outreach to developers, and to manufacture and sell its Spark kits and operating system." TC says, "Today, the company has announced a third product called Spark OS, which allows developers to integrate their projects with an open-source OS, compatible with iOS and Android...The project shifted from the Spark Socket...to the Spark Core and the Spark Cloud...“Our greatest challenge is the shifting landscape,” said Supalla. “The IoT is a big deal, and companies around the world are trying to figure out how they play in it. The market changes every week when someone launches an initiative, but luckily we move quick." Sparks team is currently 12 people, but will, BI says, "...grow to about 20-25 people within the next few months." Per BI, the Spark CEO had "targeted makers and the growing hobbyist community centered on building things with technology, but...was surprised to discover that customers wanted to use Spark to deploy across thousands of devices for work and enterprise purposes...The time and energy it takes to build a product from scratch, we can potentially cut off 6-9 months off development time and millions of dollars from R&D so you’re not starting from zero."

Im going to write a weekly blog post that follows up on opportunities for Humboldt County microcontroller users. The posts will focus first on the above six principles, then will explore emerging products and technologies, MCU-relevant entrepreneurial success news, and other topics that may help Humboldt microcontroller users achieve high-profile success, or at least long term sustainable profit.

If you have comments about Spark-like opportunities in Humboldt County, or if you are interested in expanding or strengthening the community of Humboldt microcontrollers users, send an email to me at arcatabob (at) gmail {dott} com.

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