Fabric Interfaces Tutorial: E-Textiles, Conductive Thread and Trill Craft

In this video Becky Stewart guides us through creating a fabric breakout with Trill Craft, conductive thread and e-textiles. Becky walks us through the best choice of materials, the stitching techniques which work best with when dealing with conductive thread and fabrics, and the electronic principles that will help create the most reliable interfaces.
Conductive thread links:
kitronik.co.uk/collections/e-...
www.adafruit.com/product/640
www.sparkfun.com/products/13814
Conductive fabric links:
kitronik.co.uk/collections/e-...
www.adafruit.com/product/1168
Link to template:
github.com/theleadingzero/tri...
Trill Craft is a 30-channel breakout board that lets you make your own touch interfaces out of anything conductive. Trill Craft is perfect for crafting complex interfaces from conductive fabric, copper tape, metal, wire, fruit, water, and any other conductive material. Each of Trill Craft's 30 channels of capacitive sensing offer variable readings, and multiple boards can be chained together to create interfaces with hundreds of channels of capacitive touch. Trill Craft comes with an unsoldered right angle pin header for the I2C pins so you can connect the board to Bela or your system of choice.
shop.bela.io/trill
Becky Stewart is a Lecturer in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. She works with e-textiles and signal processing to build interactive, body-centric wearable computing systems. These systems often incorporate performance, fashion, music and/or design.
theleadingzero.com/

[@afroditistereo]

Amazing tutorial Becky 🙌

[@corinnesoderberg1378]

This is so cool!! Thank you alot❤❤

[@Manaoin]

Thank you so much!!!

[@thomashaberle4715]

Is it possible for you to make it portable? Also what would it take the thread to stop working?

[@tanzeelatassawarbutt4829]

hey bella i need our help.I want to do my thesis project throughthis technique can you please guide me more about this which thread you use ,fabric and how we made the electric chip? or we can buy from somewhere?

[@MclarenF1rocket]

Where did you get the press fit snap and applicator tool from ?

[@ximenaalarcon5082]

Hi Becky, many thanks for the great tutorial. I am at the point of bonding the conductive fabric. I am confused about what to do with the long threads from behind the fabric. did you cut them? On my test, I placed the conductive fabric on the threads that are loose at the end. Thanks for your help!

[@beckystewart6034]

I capture the tails of the threads under the bonded fabric whenever convenient. You can also use some glue or nail varnish to secure a knot - the thread tends to unknot itself when left on its own.

[@dundass3130]

Hi, thanks for the great tutorial! I'm still slightly confused about the part from 6:00 onwards - does the iron on adhesive still conduct between the thread and the conductive fabric pad once ironed on? If I'm getting the order correct (felt->thread->adhesive->conductive fabric)

[@disastrid]

Generally yes, there is still a conductive connection because iron-on adhesive is porous. However this is why you should always test the connection with a multimeter to make sure!

[@dundass3130]

@@disastrid ahh that makes sense now, thank you ! so it's also a good place to remember as a potential source of loose connections later on

[@rifosi]

Great! Thanks.

[@MiguelRodriguez-wn8mc]

hello very didactic, your video, I ask you some questions 1- Could you help me link to the software 2- This microcontroller that uses trill needs the Arduino yes or yes to make the connection with the PC thanks in advance

[@BelaPlatform]

Thank you. To answer your questions, yes you do need a microcontroller to read from the Trill sensor. Most microcontroller which support i2c will work, e.g. arduino, teensy, stemmaQT. Also raspberry Pi or Bela work really well. Here is more information: learn.bela.io/using-trill/get-started-with-trill/ The example which Becky uses at the end of the video is for Bela and can be found here: learn.bela.io/using-trill/trill-and-bela/ Here's the link for Arduino getting started guide and examples: learn.bela.io/using-trill/trill-and-arduino/

[@arisoda]

Couldn't you take out the microcontroller and place it directly on your fabric? Yes the connectors are small but then you'll not have such a big clunky metal think attached. With the microcontroller only, it's like nothing is there!

[@BelaPlatform]

Yes, you definitely could. We have seen a few projects doing this with tiny wifi enabled microcontrollers which can then send the touch information on to another computer for sonification or visualisation. Also check out this project where the Bela Mini is embedded into an interactive blanket: blog.bela.io/kobakant-blanket/