Pressure sensor and application

by Fawn

Felt Sensors

Since this is a pretty new area to me. I wanted to better understand different types of sensors. I experience with making a stretch sensor, a bend sensor and pressure sensors in lab. The idea of touching and sound gave me the inspiration to create something that allows people to communicate with each other through pressure sensors.

My inspiration came from games pieces such as magnetic poem pieces, Scrabble, and Banagram, all uses small game pieces with words to convey words or sentences. I also thought about how Morse Codes used a tapping sequence (sound) to communicate. I thought a combination of the two would be an interesting area to explore.

How to make a felt sensor

Materials used

  • Two pieces of 2″x2″ felt pieces
  • Two pieces of 1.5″x1.5″ velostat
  • Conductive velcro
  • Conductive thread
  • Conductive tape
  • Regular needles and thread

Instructions

How to create unique identity for individual sensor?

It was a challenge figuring out how to assign a “word” to a piece of sensor” through Arduino. I looked at three possibilities:

Testing

Felt Sensor Testing

As you can see from the video, the connection points need some improvements. This would achieve more stable visualizations. Also the visualizations looked more or less the same from the different felt pieces, thus my goal of providing a different output from each piece was not achieved.

Potential solutions:

  • Construct sensors to provide unique voltages
  • Create unique visualization on processing for each sensor
  • Better construction of connection points

Future application for this experiment could be a sound pieces game for visually impaired or people with reading challenges.

Model Clay Sensor

I also had some extra time to create a pressure sensor made out of model clay.

The construction is more or less the same as the felt sensor, except I used conductive threads instead of tape. Below are the results:

View the testing of these sensors here.

These could have interesting applications in children’s crafts as an easy way for people to make sensors.

PPT