Week 8 & 9

It's crunch time! The end of the quarter approaches soon, and these past two weeks we're really kicked it into gear.

The shirt's come together, with more EL wire being sewn on. If there's one thing to be learned about hand-sewing EL wire to cotton shirts, it's this:
You learn to become unattached to your designs. 

Time necessitates the sacrifice of gloves, and an alteration to the designs of our leg patterns. Instead of having leg covers that velcro around the back of the legs, we'll have them velcro straight to the leggings, sitting directly on top and disregarding the originally planned straps. On the arms, the pressure sensors were moved to the insides of the elbows, rather than the palms. The palms were both a stretch to get to work-wise, and also had much more flex than we thought the sensor could handle.

Another thing about EL wire: unless it gets lots of structure and support, it dislikes straight lines and sharp turns. Our original design has been adapted to form curves instead of corners, and incorporates much more looping, to work with the EL wire's natural shape rather than against it.

Planning out the arms, from early in the week

By slimming down the design, we made creating two suits much more manageable. The back of the suit will house the hardware components, velcro-ed down so that the wires don't shift around too much while the dancers' movement gets quicker. 

After redesigning the EL wire, we were able to move on to actually implementing some of the sensors. The pressure sensors were soldered to their wires, and placed on the suit. The wires we used were narrow gauge insulated wire that was thin enough to be sewn directly into the cloth. The pressure sensors are large square sensors, so instead of sewing them on, it was easier and more secure to attach adhesive velcro to the backs of them.

By the end of all this, we had all of the EL wire sewing done, and the suits pretty well on their way! With only one week left, we had a pretty list of things that still need to get done:

• Put the final touches onto the suits (aka tack all the sensors down, finish up the pockets)
• Troubleshoot some issues with the pressure sensors being erratic. 
• Test the suits with final choreography
• Put together a presentation!

As the clock ticks down, things are getting real exciting!