Lasercut Stretchy Conductive Fabric Traces

How to make conductive fabric traces from non-stretchy fabric and attach them to stretchy fabric.

You will need:

Conductive fabric. I used Cobaltex from Less EMF http://www.lessemf.com/fabric.html
Wonder Under or some other iron-on adhesive sheeting (you can get it at fabric stores)
Laser cutter
Clothing iron
Flux
Soldering iron
Stuff you want to solder
rhinestone glue (like Gemtac) for gluing your components to the fabric.

I used these conductive fabric traces in my Caché dress, which is made out of cotton jersey. You can read more about that here: http://infosyncratic.nl/projects/cache-online-and-offline-identity/ or see more of these pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nadya/sets/72157617355268049/

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Step 1: Ironing on the wonder under

First you need to iron the wonder under onto your piece of conductive fabric. Put the glue side down and iron on low until the glue melts enough to stick to the fabric. If you iron it too long or too high, the glue will disappear into the fabric, and that's not so great.

Leave the paper on, that is the side that you will be lasercutting.

ktdid says: Oct 12, 2009. 12:54 PM

I am really taken with this idea.

I'd like to use it in a conductive shirt I'm making, but was wondering whether you've had any issues with shorts from the positive and negative conductive traces crossing? I will have quite a few close together so I'm worried they may cross since the shirt is flexible and short out.

nadya (author) in reply to ktdidOct 12, 2009. 1:33 PM

My signal traces are close to my ground traces, but none of the power traces could touch the ground traces. If you have them all close together, I would recommend shielding the traces with another layer of non fabric, or using fabric glue to shield the traces.

ktdid in reply to nadyaOct 26, 2009. 5:50 AM

Thanks!

One other question...I found someone who has a Universal machine but newer than the one you most likely used. Do you remember the wattage of the machine or the setting that you used to cut the traces? We were also interested in whether or not it was a CO2 laser.

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scoochmaroo says: May 12, 2009. 12:43 PM

I get an idea from your website about the purpose of this project, but could you speak more here as to what this dress does and how and why? Looks great! Thanks

nadya (author) in reply to scoochmarooMay 13, 2009. 1:02 PM

Hey Scoochmaroo, Each time a user clicks on any part of my body online, a signal is sent to my dress via bluetooth which then causes that body part to make a clicking noise. It gives me a better sense of where someone is looking at what, when. I have a pretty good sense of gaze in real life, but not so much in virtual worlds where photographs of me and other parts of my online identity are conflated. I was trying to fatten the connection between my online and offline identities. Nadya

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randofo says: May 11, 2009. 10:32 PM

Pretty awesome. I'm going to try this out soon. I have a few wearable projects I've been wanting to do. I was looking at the project page and was wondering how viewing those images exactly translated into what you were wearing? Does your shirt have a node for each image? What kind of sound does it make? How is it channeling the internet of the aether?

nadya (author) in reply to randofoMay 12, 2009. 6:28 AM

Hey Randofo, The golden circle things are piezo transducers which I'm driving with an astable oscillator circuit (a 555). Basically it is a PWM signal that you create in hardware. The bigger picture is: clicks on webserver are counted by a python script, sent to python script running on my laptop, which accounts for which body part the clicks correspond to and then sends a signal over bluetooth to the dress. In the pocket you see there is a bluetooth arduino with a breakout board with all the 555s on it. I'm using 555s so I can have more speakers than the atmega has PWM outputs for. That still means that not every image has its own speaker, so the images are grouped according to speaker-nodes. This is not really an optimal solution because of course 1: more speakers is always better .) and 2: although I'm almost always near my computer sometimes I am out of bluetooth range. I can run the second script on a nokia with python interpreter too, except I don't really use a nokia .). Maybe I will put up another instructable about how to design a arduino breakout board in eagle... Then I can explain more about my 555 circuitry. But I should really redesign that too, and use a multiplexer. Hmmmmmm... Nadya

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randofo in reply to nadyaMay 12, 2009. 11:01 AM

Friggin' Arduinos. They make some things so easy and some things so needlessly hard. You can probably get more PWM outputs from a PIC 16F876 chip. If you're just sending basic numbers, you might be able to work something out with text messages to your phone and then serially to a connected bluetooth module. Been thinking about figuring out the text message to bluetooth module thing myself for some time (that is why I was curious how you were doing it). An Arduino breakout board Instructable would be great. I could use one of those.

nadya (author) in reply to randofoMay 13, 2009. 12:55 PM

Mmm, pics. There aren't a whole lot of people here I can ask questions about pics to. Multiplexers though, I hope are my future. I've also been working on this major hack for adding gpio to my phone, and my idea is to basically do a phototransistor matrix in a light sealed case and an iphone app. Drawback is paying money just to share the app :(.