Tilt Sensing Bracelet

A bracelet decorated with six conductive fabric petals and a thread of beads with a metal bead at the end, makes for a simple six point tilt detection. It is also designed so that the metal bead will make contact with two petals if it lies in between. and then of course it will make no contact when it is in the air due to throw or tipped upside-down.

This was really fun to make and the best part about it was that it worked straight away, with no mistakes made on my part. It is simple, but takes some patience to accomplish. The application really only visualized the input, I have not thought of any further uses for this. Yet.

The feedback bracelet is connected to the tilt bracelet directly via wire, but this could also be wireless. When the bead makes contact with a conductive petal it closes the circuit for the corresponding LED, which turns it on. Check out instructables dot come for more and how to make your own!

Video with Feedback Bracelet

Video with computer visualisation

Step 1 Materials and Tools

MATERIALS:

• Conductive thread from http://members.shaw.ca/ubik/thread/use.html

also see http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/resource/conductive_thread

• Neoprene from www.sedochemicals.com
• Stretch conductive fabric from http://www.lessemf.com

also see http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/resource/stretch_conductive_fabric

• Fusible interfacing from local fabric store or

also see http://www.shoppellon.com

• Regular thread
• Regular beads
• One metal bead or small pendant
• Two sets of poppers (could also use Velcro to close bracelet)
• Male and female headers from Sparkfun http://www.sparkfun.com/
• Arduino USB board from Sparkfun http://www.sparkfun.com/
• Solderable Perfboard with copper line pattern from All Electronics http://www.allelectronics.com/
• Ribbon cable with min. 8 wires
• 6 x 10 or 20K resistors
• Aleene's Flexible Stretchable Fabric Glue from http://www.amazon.com/Aleenes-Flexible-Stretchable-Fabric-Glue/dp/B0001DSCQ0
• Arduino software free for download from http://www.arduino.cc/
• Processing software free for download from http://processing.org/

TOOLS:
- Fabric scissors
- Sewing needle
- Iron
- Fabric pen that disappears over time
- Pen and paper
- Ruler
- Soldering station (iron, helping hands, solder)
- Knife for cutting perfboard
- File for filing edges
- Wire cutters and strippers
- Pliers

Comments

[trevren11]

what exactly is the point of this? does it allow you to control a mouse or what i am a little confused

[Plusea]

it is a tilt sensor. it makes electrical contact with different patches, depending on what angle you hold your wrist at. it is component that is not (yet) part of a larger context.

[trevren11]

ahh i c i think it would be cool to make the patches into like a hemishperical bowl and attach the string thing to the center so you could attach it to a mouse thing and control your mouse with tilting your hand, just saying

[Plusea]

yes, i'm interested finding an existing or make a circuit that makes it easy to fake mouse input. i also like the idea of the bowl with a ball in it for x, y directional input. thanks

[freerunnin1]

if you hook it up to usb then download joy2key... you can use the software to mimic the input from keyboard and mouse

[Plusea]

thank you and i will try this as soon as i get home:-) but i also want to try the pure hardware version, so that people could really just plug, and not have to download any software.

[NachoMahma]

. Very nice iBle, but how is this an accelerometer? What am I missing? . heehee 6 out of 7 of the Related iBles are yours. You go, girl!

[Plusea]

You are right. I'm not sure if it really a accelerometer by definition, but somehow i thought it was more than just a multi-tilt sensor. I've decided to re-name the Instructable due to this possible confusion. Thanks so much for these comments!!! I agree with both.

[hamjudo]

You could make a version that measures 3 levels of acceleration by adding an outer conductive sensor ring close enough to the sensor petals so that the bead can touch both at once. Replace the fixed length string with a spring. At rest, the metal bead would only contact the petals. When the user is doing something active, the spring would stretch and the bead would hit the outer ring and the petals. More intense activity, and the bead would hit just the outer ring. The outer ring could be subdivided if there are enough inputs left on the computer. I'm afraid that I don't have rhythm, but if the wearer did have musical and dance talent, the arduino could generate MIDI signals to drive an external synthesizer. Or generate simpler sounds in the ardiuno itself. Adding the force aspect could lead to a more interesting dance. Nice iBle. I like ones that inspire variation.

[nagutron]

I think it's an accelerometer in the sense that it can tell the direction of acceleration force. Gravity is simply a fixed acceleration force. So, this accelerometer doesn't give magnitude information, but does give binary acceleration data in six directions in a plane.

[NachoMahma]

. Sounds good to me. Close enough for DIY, anyway. ;)

[bernard192]

Pretty cool! Very well done! I think I read somewhere that some cars incorporate something like this into their alarm systems. When you park the car, it watches whatever "pad" the "beads" are on, and if the car moves and the "pad" changes, it sets off the alarm.

[Pyrotechnic-Robot]

I love this I have a totally of question for you Is there a way you can control LEDs on the arduino with VB? I have been looking the web but nothings come up.

[Pyrotechnic-Robot]

What program did you use?

[Plusea]

I use processing (www.processing.org) to write a little application that reads the serial input from the arduino and visualize it as a graph and then trigger the red colouring of the dots on the screen which represent the contacts of the tilt sensor. i switch between graph and dots by pressing the "space bar" and "g". you can download all the code in the last step of the instructable. both arduino and processing environments are free for download from their sites.

[Syuzi]

This is awesome hannah! I've made a bi-directional tilt sensor before using a metallic bead (on thread) set inside a rectangular cavity. If I can find the thing I'll post some photos. I simply love that your tilt sensor is multi-directional. great work!

[Plusea]

Oh yes, I'd love to see! Please send me photos or maybe you could post it on your blog and send me a link :-) Thanks