Workshop Win: LED Cuffs

00015We had a fantastic turnout at Tuesday’s LED Cuff workshop, the first in what may be a series of soft circuit workshops. We’re thrilled that so many people—many of whom were new to HacDC—came.

For those of you interested in conductive thread, Syuzi Pakhchyan (author of the tutorial we followed) wrote up a nice conductive thread overview; in this workshop we used the conductive thread from Lamé Lifesaver profiled there. I bought the conductive velcro from LessEMF, where you can also buy all sorts of conductive fabrics.

There are a few things I would do differently with this workshop in the future, so I started a Lessons Learned wiki page. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts to it. Much thanks to Ash (see photo) for the impromptu help explaining how the circuit works as well as assisting workshop participants.

What soft circuit would you like to build next? Personally I’d love to transform a WMATA SmarTrip card into a wearable cuff—I’ve already extracted the RFID chip from one—so figuring out how a suitable antenna could be constructed is the next step.

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