Thanks Dad

Experimentation and sampling are well underway.  This is what my desk looks like this morning.

What you can see are some speakers that I hope will be the size of the ones that we use on fabric the type and size of the final piece.  If you look carefully to can see my old hifi system which I am using the speaker outlets for an amplified signal.  The result is a lovely stereo quilt!  A big thanks to my lovely Dad for that suggestion!  He also came up with a couple of other suggestions that seem to have made a big difference behind the scenes as well.  50 years as an electrical engineer are still paying off.

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

Embroidered Speakers Part 1

We have begun developing the embroidered speakers for the Paths to Utopia project.  I am working with Dr Matthew Howard from the Centre for Robotics Research, KCL and one of his students Bowen Han.  The samples in the picture are a variety of stitched wires and conductive threads.   Unusually for me these first samples were all free motion embroidered by hand with a mixture of couching and cabling.  The first test was to see if we could get signal to go through the circuits and we managed it on all the samples.  Of course some samples were better than others but we could get an audible but quiet ‘buzz’.  That was because we weren’t amplifying the signal but we will look to try and do that later in the process.

The next stage was to actually digitally embroider the speakers for two reasons.  We can accurately measure the length of the thread so we can then accurately work out the electronics and secondly because they do look lovely when they are done that was.

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