Published by Tom on November 29, 2007 02:50 pm
under The Softness of Things
| This week for softness is about MATERIALS! I like them… or at least I really love some of them, especially felt. There is something extremely pleasing to me about the pureness and density of felt. It is waterproof, insulating, soft, firm… kinda like fabric you can mold. So, when material week came I thought I would give a felt project a try.I have been interested in the idea of really tactile and soft interfaces for some time; something you can really sink your hands into in an organic way… thats missing from electronics. I decided to combine both of my interests and make Conductive Felt. I needed to first figure out how to somehow inject a conductive material into the felting process. I tried unraveling conductive thread first… but that was going to take too long… and then I thought of steel wool, and that worked; it also made a nice conceptual parallel: only using natural wool and steel wool to make felt. After I had the solution, it was time to make felt.Felting (the process of making felt) is tricky and time-consuming. There are two ways: wet and dry. I went for the wet felting method because I thought I could get a better a better mix of the two wools. Problem is, its really hard to make good felt… esp with wet felting. The process is simple… apply heat and pressure to wool… and ta-da you get felt… but in reality, its HARD to get a good dense felt. BUT, I did manage to make some decent stuff after a few tries and it was time to hook up some electronics.The result was not only a felt resistor… but a variable felt resistor… which is really useful. This is whats happening in the felt: You ground one side of the felt (white lead and safety clip in the photos/video) and insert a positive electrode (pin or any conductive thing) anywhere in the felt. Depending on how close the end of the electrode is to the ground the more or less steel wool the electricity has to travel through; because the steel wool has some resistance, it adds up to an analog value you can put into a microcontroller or amp.What you see in the video is the felt resistor acting as a variable resistor to control a servo motor… but you can use it to control anything, just like a knob or button.
This project is really exciting to me. I think I am on to something that has not really been explored before… and thats nice. It needs some more development, like better felting and implementation… but I’m working on it. I think I am going to create a larger installation for the Softness final… we will see! |
|
|
