LilyPad Arduino Talk Tomorrow

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Arduino is a popular, easy-to-use open-source board that’s being used by makers for their projects. The Lilypad Arduino is a wearable, sewable version of the board. Leah Buechley, the Lilypad’s creator is going to be speaking in Seattle on Computational Textiles and the Democratization of Ubiquitous Computing. Wow! If you can’t make it the talk will be broadcasted live tomorrow (3:30 PM PST).

Here’s the talk description:

The blossoming research field of computational/electronic textiles (or e-textiles) integrates computation with fabric. E-textile researchers weave, solder and sew electronics into cloth to build soft, flexible and washable computational devices. E-textiles is a young discipline, and developments in the field have been relegated almost exclusively to research labs in industry and academia.

This talk will present advancements that make e-textiles accessible to new audiences, describing developments in e-textile engineering, design and applications that are helping to democratize ubiquitous computing. The talk will detail techniques that enable researchers (and others) to integrate electronic hardware with cloth, including a method for creating printed circuit boards on fabric; provide demonstrations of several novel e-textile designs, including a programmable beaded bracelet; and discuss educational applications of e-textiles.

The discussion of educational e-textiles will focus on the development of the commercially-available LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that enables novices to build their own soft computers by sewing microcontroller, sensor, and actuator modules together with conductive thread. The construction kit was developed through an iterative design process that involved several user studies, and preliminary results indicate that the kit could provide a powerful means to engage diverse audiences in ubiquitous computing and, more generally, computer science and electrical engineering.

The ETech workshop on the Arduino board is full, but it’s well-covered in the excellent book Making Things Talk. You can get Lilypad boards and sensors at Sparkfun.

(Image: Leah Buechley)