Synth Sleeves

Synth Sleeves

Made out of resistive threads, the Synth Sleeve is a stretch sensor which detects the motion of the body’s articulations. This project explores stitching methods to produce textile sensors and is part of a series of experiments using real time data and electronic wearables.

For the sleeves, I knitted string tubes to cover the cables which connects the sensor to the hardware So, to capture the position of the arm, the sleeves are, actually, stretch sensors which use analog input. The knitted sleeves have two strings and one connects to the analog pin which is internally connected to 3.3V and the other string connects to the ground.

Trying to integrate the technology within the textile structure I used old textiles method such as stitching, crochet and knitting to produce sensors. From this table it was possible to understand that the best option was the knitted sensor, because after stretching it, it goes back easily to its initial position

So as you can see in the first picture I made my hand-made knitting machine and I produced more knitted sensors with different qualities, being big, small, large, thin and with different thickness of wool.

Here I am evaluating 4 of those sensors.
The A, C and D has resistive thread in all the knitted circular structure but A is made with a thicker wool.
The B option has only a stripe of resistive thread knitted on it.
So I found the C sensor , as the best option. Because Unlike B, which delivers a large range of data values, the C one captures more precisely the angle of the arm due its circular shape. This part of the research was digested in a paper which was presented at the beginning of November at the D_TEX Textile Design Conference 2017 in Lisbon.

In the project above, one can see how the connection goes with the wearables and textile. The project was supported by the Media Interface professorship of the Bauhaus Universität and was part of my master thesis called “Codes in Motion” (2017) and by the DAAD scholarship.