Fashion designers can now make clothes using specialty fabrics, LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes), communications components, GPS components, and other sundry electronics for special effects. Designers must also have open software programing skills to program the tiny circuit boards that are embedded in the clothes to control the electronic components and sensations that the designer wants to impart in the clothing.

The first component of many wearable items is an LilyPad Arduino Board. This is a tiny controller board that was created to be used in wearable items and with e-textiles. E-textiles are fabrics that have been created with conductivity in mind. Most of the fabrics have either one or two metal coatings and can be sewn with special thread that will continue the conductivity from piece to piece.

Leah Buechley, a PhD student at the University of Colorado, has created various different wearables from a jacket for bikers that has functional turn signals to a dance outfit with sensory sleeves that interact with a player piano. She also has a do it yourself portion of her web site that outlines the all of the components, provides the code for the controller board and step by step instructions for created a few wearable projects of your own.

Should you desire to actually take a course on creating wearable clothing, Mediamatic will be offering a Wearables Master Course in Amsterdam in April. Leah Buechley will be teaching the course.

---

Related posts:

Bend it, wrap it, stretch it: the new silicon circuit

REDFLY, The Windows Mobile Foleo Fiasco?

Suspended animation may rely on rotten eggs

Rower half-way to Hawaii, aided with gadgets galore

Comcast, CERN speed up the Internet for very few.

Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:35 am under Gadgets.