It works!

Well after a lot of sampling and a lot of help from the team at the Centre for Robotics Research at KCL we have embroidered speakers that are triggered when the quilt is touched.  A very big thanks must go to Brendan Michael for all his fantastic help on this.

There is still a lot of behind the scenes stuff to sort but in the meantime you might like to see this film of one of the test samples working.

Just so you know whats going on, I deliberately made the connections long (the circuit is about 2.5m in total) to test off the resistance of the thread.  The spiral and part of the wiggly line has been digitally embroidered on my lovely Pfaff Sensation.  The rest is couched by hand.  At the beginning of the film you will see me trigger the sound file to play by touching a wire to a trigger point on a Lilypad.  The camera then shows the length of the circuit before zooming in on the speaker and showing the back with a powerful magnet.  The sound file is cutey Diogo Mello and his Dad singing as I have yet to get the boys sound file sorted.

The thread has been kindly supplied by UK based Benton and Johnson and I will tell you about that amazing company in a future blog.  In the film it’s their silver super twist.  There are a couple of adaptations that I make to both the thread and my machine to be able to embroider with it but I am afraid that at the moment that’s all top secret!

This is their website  https://www.thetoyeshop.com/benton-johnson.html

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.