Sewable Arduino Interface

How to create a sewable interface for your Arduino USB board. It is probably not the best solution, especially compared to the Arduino LilyPad. But it is an option for textile electronic projects that use conductive thread and would like to sew directly to the inputs of an Arduino board.

Step 1 Materials and Tools

MATERIALS
- Solderable Perfboard with copper line pattern from All Electronics http://www.allelectronics.com/
- Male and female headers from Sparkfun http://www.sparkfun.com/
- Regular thread
- Piece of fabric
- Small square of stretch fabric
- Arduino USB board from Sparkfun http://www.sparkfun.com/
- 9V battery with a 9V battery snap wired to a power plug
- Conductive thread from www.sparkfun.com
also see http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/resource/conductive_thread

TOOLS
- Soldering iron and solder
- Cutting knife
- File
- Ruler
- Sewing needle
(- Helping hands and/or breadboard)

Comments

[Bilby]

What a neat concept, thanks! I'm not sure what I'd use this for, but the methodology behind he perfboards could be used with any electronics you wanted to integrate with clothing... Do you know if the thread and headers could be washed in the cloth / clothing? Thanks Bilby

[Plusea]

yes, i think the conductivity for the conductive thread and the headers should survive washing. maybe not in the washing machine, but hand wash with lunkwarm water and mild detergent. Leah Buechley includes some results from washing conductive fabric traces in the following paper on page 11... >> http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/publications/buechley_PUC_07.pdf

[Bongmaster]

interesting :)