Outcome

Intention

The goal of this project was to use machine knitting and conductive yarn to show how  quick plug-and-play style finger buttons can be created in order to both do quick prototyping for e-textiles as well as to create meaningful products.

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

Fabricated example with an LED sewn on with conductive thread for testing and knitout code for generating example:

Reflection

Over the course and the project I realized that evaluating and calibrating many of the materials we used can be quite challenging and requires a good amount of physical prototyping and experiments which would be interesting to do. The first project that I wanted to do was to see how well muscle wire would be at keeping specific angles such that it can be used to fold stiff starched cotton or paper for box folding. With a little bit of experimenting I realized that it was quite challenging and getting the same effect would require carefully planned path. Then I looked at use the knitting machine to rapidly fabricate simple conductive setups that could be useful for e-textiles projects, again calibrating conductivity and resistance with varying yarn types and yarn amounts would be interesting.

Sample Book

Muscle wire based actuation:

Soft buttons with removable separators for easy prototyping:

Gemma making sounds