Week 6 & 7!

In the last two weeks, we've made a lot of progress toward the physical suit.

Week 6, we set up the force sensitive resistors as a voltage divider with a 10k resistor and an LED light using an Arduino. This week, we mapped out how we would hook up the pressure sensors to the EL Sequencer since we want to have two pressure sensors for each suit. The (PS) is the pressure sensor; the M stands for a male side of jumper wire; and the F stands for female side of a wire.

The wiring is slightly more complex than on the Arduino because we are using the 5V power output for the basic breakout that allows us to load our code onto the board. In order to use the 5V for the breakout and the pressure sensors, we decided to crimp a female-to-male jumper wire to three male-to-male wires. One of these will go to the basic breakout, and the two others will be soldered to one end of the pressure sensors.  On the actual suit, we plan to use the square force-sensitive resistors because they will give the dancers more surface area to work with.

Week 7:

We also ordered the extra EL wire and jumper wires we needed to start working with the newly-arrived accelerometers. In addition, we received the square force-sensitive resistors and new stronger batteries to try and give the EL wire more power. With the current batteries the EL wire is very dim, and we have our doubts that it will look very impressive on the suit.

The new square force-sensitive resistors are much larger, and prove to be slightly more difficult to work with. We're in the middle of deciding where on the hands/arms these sensors will go, considering that flexing the sensors causes some unwanted input. We're considering putting the sensors elsewhere, to be tapped/touched to activate, rather than on the palms like we'd originally planned, which will flex quite often.

In terms of the shirt, we got one of our EL wires sewn on - the ambient blue, that will be on all the time. Now that we have the first one done, we should be able to move much quicker.

We've also started soldering onto the other two boards, moving them along the road of being able to be put on suits as well. The original board has successfully been set up to respond to multiple sensors: aka, we hooked up the EL wire along with two pressure sensors and a sound sensor. Together, the wires respond to corresponding sensors separately. Exciting!

We hope to have the majority of sewing for the shirt done by next week, have the legs of the suit started, and the majority of the soldering done for the main components.