Designed on Nature: a dress inspired by blood vessels
by Ellan Fei Spero
Links and Lessons Learned
The original concept for this dress included a subtle LED "heartbeat" connected to a small lithium battery and connected to a textile arduino I used the ATmega328 and had some difficulties attaching the bootloader to the chip (link to the 168 is on the website). In the future - it is advisable to program the chip before making the textile 'board.' There was a short somewhere so I didn't get this part to work - though I might still add it in the future.
I wanted to use 2 LEDs to creat the heartbeat effect so that they created an illusion of talking to each other.
"heartbeat" LEDs on breadboard
Attach:Beat.pde Δ Link to code for 2 LED heartbeat
Another piece that took a bit of troubleshooting was taking an image generated through Processing and turning it into a shape that could be laser cut. I did this in illustrator with the following sequence of operations: fill object, go to path-
select- offset path, rasterize, go to live trace - check off fills, then also in the live trace menu select show outline.