This project comes from the Instructables website. It is called Feltronics, and it's a creative way to learn about basic circuitry and schematics using felt and real wiring. The Instructables tutorial walks you through the build process, and includes downloadable image files that you can print and cut out for the felt components. Using a glue gun, I pieced together the different layers of felt and inserted the necessary wires and components, like buttons and LEDs.

Below are some pictures of the different pieces. In the last photo, you see the four main components: Power on the left (which has a watch battery underneath it), a switch/button at the top, an LED at the right, and a resistor on the bottom. The four components, connected by ring magnets, make up the circuit. The circuit is open to start with, and it's not until you hold down the button that the circuit then closes, and lights up the LED. You can see the circuit in action at the bottom of this post.

This is Drawdio, invented by the same person that created the Makey Makey, Jay Silver. Drawdio uses conductive tape, a small speaker, a battery, the graphite in a pencil and a bit of circuitry to allow you to make drawings that come to life with sound.

You can buy a ready-made Drawdio pencil that just works, or you can build it yourself with a kit of parts from places like Adafruit Industries. I decided to build it. As this was my first time soldering in a long time, it's a good project because there aren't too many places to mess up! Adafruit provides a very detailed tutorial on how to build Drawdio, so that's what I used. 

The concept is pretty straight forward. You have a speaker powered by one AAA battery, set up in an open circuit. The second you close the circuit with your body, the speaker sounds. Your body closes the circuit because you are touching the conductive tape with your drawing hand. The tape is connected to the circuit board/speaker, then out to the top of the pencil where it connects to the graphite inside the pencil using a thumbtack. You draw with the pencil, and touch the drawing with your other hand, thereby closing the circuit. Okay, it might be easier just to watch! Notice how the pitch adjusts depending on distance between hand and pencil.

This week I explored two different tools and the interaction between them. The first is Scratch, a free, online programming language that allows for very creative and artistic projects. The programming is easy to get into, but also comprehensive, so there's a lot to explore and try out once you get started. 

My project is a simple one, it's a short campus tour given by a flying butterfly. I took an aerial shot of our campus using Google Maps, and saved the image as a screenshot to place on the Scratch stage. I then grabbed one of the sprites (characters) from the Scratch library, to serve as the tour guide. Using commands that I dragged from one side of the screen to the other, I created the program step by step. See my Scratch project here. 

The second tool is the Makey Makey, which comes in because I used three key stroke commands to trigger the tour...LEFT, RIGHT and UP. Using playdough as arrow keys, one can take the tour by pressing down on them.

Below is a short clip of the Makey Makey set up and its interaction with Scratch.

Today, for a class that I am taking, I created a Squishy Circuit. Squishy Circuits are made from two types of dough, conductive and insulating. Conductive dough is one that allows an electrical current to pass through it. Insulating dough does not allow current to pass through. Using the two together, along with some LEDs, I am able to make a circuit that lights up the LEDs. 

Below is a video showing what was created and how it works. One thing I did not say on the video is that connecting the red (positive) wire to the bottom of the head means that I needed to put the long (positive) end of the LEDs on the bottom half of the head as well. Otherwise, the lights would not have lit up, since LEDs only work in one direction. You can discover more about Squishy Circuits on the Resources page of our web site.

Today I explored Sparkle, an E-Textile project. Using LEDs, a programmable microprocessor, a battery, and conductive thread, I spruced up the St. Matthew's Summer School T-Shirt. Below are some pictures of the shirt in progress. You will notice the conductive thread running between the microprocessor, the LEDS and the battery. This thread is what allows the electricity to travel between the parts, thereby creating the circuit.

You can check the Resources page on this web site for more information about Sparkle. Below is a video clip of the final project. One of the amazing things about Sparkle is that you can program the lights to blink in different sequences and speeds by using a programming tool on the web. You literally hold Sparkle up to the computer screen to program it!