Softness, Week 13, Snowflake v2



This week I sewed snowflake together. I think the tails turned out
quite well. I'm not entirely pleased with the look of the hood, I think
I'll try to streamline it in the next version. Tomorrow I am also
looking forward to everyone's reactions for input. The Brother PC420 is
a fabulous sewing machine. I particularly like the manual, which is
adeptly written to aid unattended novices like me to enter the world of
sewing.

While constructing the hat I finished the schematic for snowflake. The
light grey lines denote basting on the right side of the fabric, dark
grey is basting on the bottom. The idea is to leave ground and data on
the wrong side and power on right. BOOM are piezo's, one for playing
sounds and the other for the tapping recognition. I did some
preliminary tests with the accelerometer. After initial calibration, I
think looking for a change of 8 in any of the axis persistent over 20s
should work reasonably well. That said, I need to build and try it out.



Which brings me to the main problem: conductive thread. I ordered
conductive thread from LessEMF. They were prompt which was
great as the thread was here in ample time. However, the resistance is
way to high on the thread to be useful, about 950 ohms per 10 cm. Ouch.
The thread Despina donated is about 3.3 ohms per 10 cm. So that
miscalculation brought my construction process to a halt. On the bright
side, I did some testing with the button hole sewing feature of the
PC420. It works beautifully with the Lilypad. Once I get some thread I
should be able to make a tight circuit.

During the next few days I am going to try to hunt down some thread for
immediate use, and also order a few more spools from various places.



-- Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:12 -0500

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