Week 4

This week we made a prototype shirt! We sewed EL wire onto a shirt and tested how it would work on a person. We discovered that sewing points of the EL wire down gave it enough flexibility and stability. Also, crossing the EL wire and sewing it at the same time lead to scrunching the fabric. The finished product is a prototype with the EL wire connected to a shirt and the sensors.

With some advice from last week's Sound Reactive EL Wire tutorial, we were able to get software onto the EL sequencer. From there we were able to have the EL wire on the prototype flash on and off. We had some issues getting the software from a computer to the prototype. Here are the tricks we discovered for making it work:

• Use the most current version of Arduino
• choose the correct settings
• under Tools->Board-> LilyPad Arduino => processor option AtMega328
• Reset board the first time to get USB serial
• Verbose output is available under Aruino -> Preferences 
• works for USB 3.0 and 2.0

We also experimented with putting the shirt on a person to see if it still had the flexibility we will need for dancing.

Using the sound sensor, we also got the EL Wire to react to sound.

We also had a meeting with our choreographer and discussed performance spaces, design, and some issues with flexibility. 

Next week we hope to have the rest of our sensors working and a finalized design!