For this week’s assignment I decided to try out several experiments with the latex and silicone as tools for making non woven textiles. The first thing I made is a simple rectangular piece with an LED embedded inside. I used conductive tape for the two ends of the LED and cast it inside the silicone. [...]
Last year, I experimented with embedding small spherical magnets in an elastic fabric in order to simulate a controlled surface deformation: With this assignment, I wanted to recreate a similar effect by embedding the magnets in silicone. First I made a mold by laser cutting plexi and stacking it to get the inverse of what [...]
For the nonwoven textile project, I tested felting wool roving with aluminum wool as conductive material. In this quick test, I soldered a small LED to a crimp-beaded aluminum wool. It seems to light up and work! I liked the fact that everything can be felted into one material/surface; no need for stitching conductive thread, [...]
One of my favorite painting is Van Gogh’s Starry Night as evidenced through the pictures below. I wanted to recreate an abstract version of this painting using silicon and optic fibers. I first built a molt using Legos, I left holes where fiber optics should go. I then cut up several fiber optics pieces and scored cuts [...]
Micro fluidic devices are an emerging topic in Mechanical Engineering and have many applications in chemistry, biology, and medicine. The goal of this project was to create a larger micro fluidic device from silicone to demonstrate some of the properties of low Reynolds number flows without a microscope. A few mili fluidic devices I made in 2.674 are [...]
Thermochromatic Grid I colored thread with thermochromatic ink (just dipped it in a cup with some liquid color). After it dried I used the bumps of the Lego bricks of the walls of the mold to create a grid with two layers of thread. The original idea was to put current on the tread but [...]
This week I made three composite textiles using a duplication polymer that is mostly used in dentistry. I also use this polymer to make many of the samples I use in my research, so I thought it would be fun to use it in new and experimental ways.
For my nonwoven project, I wanted to play with casting solid materials in silicone, so I decided to cast different candies in the form of jewelry. At first I was not sure what kind of reaction silicone would have to sugars but it turned out that the silicone cured well around the sugary delectables. I chose [...]
This week, since I had never caste silicon, I decided to focus my project on learning the basics of casting. However, as with all of my projects, I wanted to ensure that there was seme functional purpose to me efforts. Introducing the Walicon — A Wallet Made of Silicon. In addition to making a function [...]
This week our assignment was to “Make a piece of flexible non-woven fabric at least 6″x6″ (~15cm x 15cm) with some noteworthy characteristic. (An unusual blend of materials, interesting structural characteristics, embedded circuitry, special electrical properties …?)” We were given a tutorial on casting latex rubber and silicone. I practiced using the latex rubber and [...]