Puppeteer Motion-Capture Costume

Step 7 HARD CIRCUIT

Certain parts of the circuit we simply did not want to risk washing or exposing to a lot of wear and tear. These components include: the power source batteries, the Microcontroller Arduino LilyPad (www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_lilypad_arduino.html), the XBee wireless module, the Multiplexers, as well as various small components such as voltage regulators, capacitors, resistors and wire connections. In the case of the first Puppeteer suit all of these components were anyway not affixed to the costume itself, because there was a wired connection. In the later costumes we chose to integrate these components in part of the costume that could be removed from the rest of the suit so that the sensors and conductive traces could be washed separately. For the second Puppeteer version we stored these components inside a little backpack type accessory that came out on top of the rest of the costume like a hood and plugged into the ends of the conductive traces coming from the sensors via some handmade lugs that we were could sew to. These we made from headers, wire and Shapelock http://www.shapelock.com
In the third Puppeteer version we integrated the components in the collar of the suit and the collar came right down the front of the suit, reaching the tops of the thighs and plugging into the ends of the conductive traces via metal poppers. In both cases we had access to the circuit by opening a zipper in the little backpack or the collar.