I don’t know if you can see, but this is my setup.

The top is the main part of my circuit. The power wire is on the thumb. When it touches any of the fingers, it completes the circuit, sending a signal through an LED into one of the digital pins. The LED does not provide enough resistance to negate the signal when I use the 5 volt pin as the power.

The middle is just a simple LED connected to digital pin 13. It shows the two modes that my glove has: mouseclick and mousemove.

The bottom is an accelerometer. Starting from the left, they’re the test, z, y, x, ground, and power pins. If you want to read from the test, z, y, or x pins, you connect then to any of the analog pins in the Arduino. I only use X and Z, but I still plug in the other pins if I wish to do anything with them in the future.

This is the final version. You have pretty good mobility with the glove, although it is quite fragile as is.

The way I have it working is the Arduino will print letters into serial using the Serial.print() function each time I want something to happen. A different event will print a different letter. The letters are read into Java code. From then on, you can do basically anything Java lets you do.

I’m going to post a link to the page that shows you how to let Java code read serial prints from the Arduino. If you know Java, and you want to use it with the Arduino, this is the way to go. It’s a bit long, but it is so worth it. Just take an hour to set this up. It’s so cool.

This is a working version of the final project of Physical Computing.

Project 3 is Pixel Bend, where we will make the Arduino communicate to another device. My project will let it talk to the computer and control the mouse. I will wire it up to a glove so that it can be worn to control mouse events. Unfortunately I don’t have the diagram with me at the moment, so it will be posted last.

Project Runaway actually gave me a lot of bumps in the road. The most important one being that sewing tiny pins of a demultiplexer that are so close together takes hours upon hours. Seriously, unless you’re super amazing at sewing or if you have a week to do sew it on, don’t do it!

When grounding a input pin, put a large enough resistor to the ground. If the resistor is not big enough, the electricity will actually flow through the circuit where you don’t want it to. This actually caught me by surprise as I haven’t encountered this problem before, but it’s something I need to look out for from now on.

As for LEDs, make sure the longer wire is going to the power, and the shorter one to ground. If it’s connected backwards, it will not light.

Lastly, the RXTX pins (Digital pins 0 & 1) must not be connected to either power or ground when a program is being loaded into the Arduino. If it is, program being sent in is muffled and will not be loaded and the Arduino will just run what was previously loaded. The upload will result in an error in the uploading program Arduino alpha.

So, turns out sewing a chip onto a piece of cloth is more work than I could handle. Because the pins are so small and close together, conductive thread touch each other and it’s just a bad time when your conductive thread touch each other when you don’t want them to.

I sewed on basically the same design that was for my first project. As was stated in the post of the first project, the design is really flexible as to what you want to light up, so really it works with everything.

Things didn’t really go the way I wanted it to, but it worked out in the end. =)

I have a picture of the clothing that the LEDs were sewed on. You can’t really see it, but the left sleeve (the right sleeve in the picture), has LEDs on it. Thanks to Gretchen Rodriguez for being my manikin. =P

A picture of a working version on my breadboard.

Here is what my second project looks like on paper. I forgot to mention that all the diodes in my diagrams are the light-emitting diodes (LED’s).

This project will be a wearable project, where we will have a meaningful interaction which must be attached to a shirt, pants, a hat or whatever. First comes the planning though.

The middle part of this diagram is the juicy part. It is a Demultiplexer (demux) which I’ll post a link to how it works, but it’s pretty easy to see with the diagram here.

Starting from the top of the demux, the left pin is just a power pin which is connected to power. It can also be connected to a digital pin if you want to be able to turn off the LED’s, which I will actually be doing. The rest of the pins are starting from the left, output 0 to output 6, which are 7 LED’s.

Now for the bottom of the demux, starting from the left side, the three on the left are what controls which LED will be turned off. The next two, as well as the pin on the far right must always be ground. The next one must always be connected to power. The one after that is the 8th LED. Do not ask me why it’s laid out like this. I didn’t make this. =P

The right side is a diagram of a potentiometer. I will actually have a light dependent resistor (LDR) which will turn all the LED’s off when it’s too bright, and it will automatically turn on when it’s dark enough.

The left side of the diagram is a switch which will enable the LED’s to either be always be on, or always be off regardless of the brightness which will be useful if the LED’s must be turned off when it is dark, or if you want to show off the LED’s even when it’s bright.