Process 

I have worked on machine knitting and wanted to explore using the same for generating easy conductive patches and tubes that can be used for soft-fabrication and e-textiles.

For the purpose of demonstrating the idea, I created a very simple tubular piece and sewed on an led for visualization. I think with more experiments to generate easily recognizable buttons, this can be extended into generating gloves over which these fingers can be "plugged on" to create useful input interactions such as soft chorded keyboards or musical instruments.

I used alternating sections of  non-conductive acrylic yarn and conductive yarn to machine knit the prototype. The program to machine knit this was generated using "knitout" -- a low level abstraction for machine knitting (https://textiles-lab.github.io/knitout/knitout.html) that was turned into instructions that can be run on the Shima Seiki knitting machine in the textiles lab(https://textiles-lab.github.io/) using backend code developed by the lab. 

Basic schematic