making things

Over the past week I have finally finished my knitting, been aggravated by conductive thread, and been testing LEDs.

I finally finished knitting my raindrops, and created the pouch to make the raindrop shape, and stuffed an RFID card into it.



Here is one of my raindrops, with my cloud who now has eyes. The raindrops aren't completely finished, I've left the bottom open so I can put some LEDs in them, and hook them up to a lilypad, but the basic shape is there.



I also worked on my sun a lot. Once the LEDs were put through I made the circuit with conductive thread, and tested it by temporarily adding a power source. Some of the LEDs are a little temperamental but do work.



This is the finished sun circuit. I've covered the back of the LEDs so they don't get caught up in the stuffing.



I'm also making a little sun, which will be attached to a wooly cloud to represent "partly cloudy". I've decided to put some LEDs into this one as well, as the bigger sun was relatively simple to do.



Here is the big sun partly sewn together and stuffed. The bottom has been left open so I can connect it to a lilypad later. My idea for using the LEDs is to get them to blink or flash when the RFID reader reads the appropriate card.

sun

Today I have been working on my sun. I have also done some knitting but the progress of that is not as interesting to document.

OMGZ I did like thirty more rows today that is loads LOLOLOLOLOL.

I'm getting a bit bored of the knitting so decided to do some sewing and work on my light emitting sun.

I cut out one white circle (using a bowl to get a nice round.. circle), and four yellow ones. I've decided to use two layers of yellow as the polycotton was actually quite thin, and I wanted it to be all bright and nice. I sewed the yellow bits together to make things a little easier on myself a bit later. The white layer is where the conductive thread will be, I left it loose at this stage.



I then figured out where I wanted to place the LEDs using pins to represent them. Two pins represents one LED. Using two was my pitiful attempt to make some holes for the legs of the LEDs to go through. The yellow looks so pale because my camera was freaking out at the brightness of it.



I then started putting the LEDs into place. This was painful. LEDs do not like fabric. Espesh three layers of it. I did master a technique using a pin to wiggle the legs through, some of the fabric got a bit pulled but I'm not that fussed. Anyone who mentions it will be forced to put an LED through three layers of fabric.



This is what it looks like with the LEDs in place. Now I'm on the stage where I'm making the circuit. Conductive thread hurts.



I guess I should work on some graphics. I don't want to. Graphics aren't fun. And if communication between processing and flash is done in the serial communication kind of way, the Signals from Arduino may cause interference... could use different channels but eugh.