Wearable Technology / Advanced Tech
Process, Materials and Technical documentation
Piece number 2 of Friends, Hosts And Parasites: Jacket
01. Objectives
02. Materials & Preliminary Research
03. Details on Inks
04. Printing
05. Electronics / Electricity
06. Coding

01. Objectives
Create a garment (jacket) with a pattern printed on it that only comes to life (becomes clearly visible) when the jacket is being worn and over time.

Technical challenge:
Electrically controlling 20 to 25 thermo-chromatic printed ink patterns by running resistive, conductive thread through it, and making it as wearable as possible.

02. Materials and Preliminary Research

a. Inks.
Ctiinks seems to be the primary producer and distributor of inks in North America, however, we were never able to get in touch with them.

We worked with the products Japanese company installed in California:
Matsui-Color
AQ Inks: datasheet | Temperature and Color ranges
Specific products we got: 37 Blue, 27 Black.
Mixed in with screen print fabric inks

b. Thread
We found 3 main ressource for conductive materials
1. canada
2. xxx sample
3. Bekhart

Beckart proved to be the most appropriate with the widest range of products and threads.
Specific products we used:

Lessons learnt //amongst other
1. Lots and lots of Ohm’s law
Trying to build the circuit to heat up the threads without shorting the ciruit

1. Batteries
   Batterie have internal resistance and this resistance value needs to be lower than the overall resistance on the circuit in order for the battery to work properly




2. Working with the Thermo Inks and trying to control them electrically
   The idea is simple but getting it right is tricky, we needed to find a balance between shorting and heating up.




3. About the PIC 16F819 and Code—The A Port of the Pic is set to analog by default, in order to use it as a digital input, the ADC registers need to be set for this—Using the timer interrupt to create a counter—The differences between manual cycling of turning pins ON and OFF and software PWM

Digital on off. All ports were made digital for the clusters of ports.

Basic shorting of thread that heats up the inks.

Laser cut the stencil that we used on the jacket. We were not able to screen a pre-stitched jacket.

Next Steps
a. Redesign the circuit to work with batteries – we need to figure out the internal resistance in a battery that is not allowing us to short it
b. Redesign the jacket/ other clothing that will hold more of a presence than the piece chosen.
c. Redesign the pattern with some of Annie Albers influences and a more life like ideas of patterns and clusters.
d. Re-code the whole project with the game of life – random features in mind. (I dont think we are interested in purely random but more on the lines of generative art)
e. Rework the INTERACTION. Here on further questioning and thinking it might be more interesting if the user had more control over the outfit – rather than just an on / off interaction. Maybe there is control of the level of interaction – how much of the pattern reveals – colors and so on.

This entails a complete redo – which could lend to a whole other “wearable” not just another jacket!