Introduction: Phone-friendly Glove Fingertips

About: An engineer, seamstress, cook, coder, and overall maker. Spent a summer at Instructables; got a degree in E: Neural Engineering at Olin College; made a microcontroller (tessel.io); now thinking about climate c…

You want to use your phone, but it doesn't work through gloves, and you don't want to freeze your hand just to touch the screen. So you buy those conductive-fingertip gloves. And it's pretty cool, if imprecise– but it only lasts for the first year of use. So now you have these perfectly good gloves, but you have the cold-finger-phone-swipe problem again. What do you do?

These instructions show you how to repair your glove fingertips to conductive glory– with an extra hack to improve their precision.

Or maybe, you don't want to buy the fancy gloves. Can't you just build conductive fingertips into the gloves you already have and like?

Yes, you can!

As a bonus, I think this fabric will work for longer than stock, too!

All you need is:

  • A pair of gloves (your old conductive fingerprint ones needing repair, or a set that never had fancy fingertips will do fine)
  • Stretch conductive fabric, which you can buy here: http://lessemf.com/fabric1.html#321
  • Old neoprene (I took the discards from my local sailing club's broken wetsuits) or your own idea for an in-fingertip stylus

Step 1: Cut Out Parts

For each finger, you'll need:

A bit of neoprene cut into a triangle shape (I experimented with other shapes; this worked best)

A rectangle of stretch conductive fabric that's slightly bigger than the size you want the conductive pad to be

Step 2: Place Stylus

The neoprene chunk is a 3D piece to create a specific point of contact with your screen. I positioned it as shown in the picture.

Step 3: Sew on Conductive Fabric Patch

Sew the conductive fabric on to cover and contain the neoprene stylus.

Step 4: Voila!

Now you can use your phone to your heart's content, without getting cold hands!

...It's still more frustrating to use your phone this way than barehanded, but it's all about the tradeoffs. Don't do any fancy art this way, but you can press buttons on-screen!