Tuesday, June 07, 2011

More about the Arduino Quilt

The Arduino quilt in the video from this post is my latest e-textile creation. My husband gave me the Lilypad arduino as a Christmas gift, and I had been trying to figure out what to do with it.  I was also really stuck on using this fabulous piece of antique lace in an all off-white fabric manipulation piece.
The title of this work is called "Shattered" and it was designed for the Naperville Art League's public art competition, but I didn't complete it in time. It will go to some other venues and I'm happy that the idea is complete and finally finished. 
This is what the fabric manipulations looked like in progress.
This is a close up of the arduino on the back.  It's held on by the stitches I used with the conductive thread. 
I mounted this to canvas, because the battery back sticks out pretty far and it will not lay flat against a surface if hung on a wall. 
I haven't tested how long it will run on the one battery.  
The program I wrote was done using a modified version of one of the basic ones it comes with.  I must have tweaked it 30 times before I got it right.  This uses PWM, or Pulse Width Modulation, which is how you get a LED light to fade.  I wanted this to have a soft fade effect for the lights, and the sketch program that I tweaked was better than me writing it from scratch.
After the lights were put on the front, I painted them with some cream colored acrylic paint so that they more or less disappeared on the surface of the quilt.
I hope this answers some of the questions out there about this project.  I loved making the quilt itself and really enjoyed figuring out the lights.

1 comment:

Lynne said...

Very interesting and clever. Good luck with your exhibitions.