Homemade Hardware Final

So maybe I got ambitious. Or maybe I just had rotten luck with certain things, I don’t know. All I know is I had a really sound idea that worked but in true ITP fashion, something went wrong along the way and isn’t working.

At any case,  the project.

My original intention was to make a board and LED sequins that would be sewn into fabric and make a little starry night pillow.  I even made a cute little slide show and everything to illustrate this. I mean the logistics were pretty sound– everything but the coin cell case and white surface mount LEDs were already at ITP and I just start making the boards.  Adafruit already has their eagle files up on their github (below), and all I needed to do was make a board that could have power through it, the attingy85, and  5 power and 5 ground contacts for the 5  attiny pins I could sew from…

 

Originally

Outside of breadboarding it, there’s been minimal, if any success. The old attiny used to program it went missing, had to program a new one and cut myself in the process. (get those pins in just the right away and there will be blood. Not my first time though, had and ESP wifi chip do it last semester in one of my PComp labs. ) The other issue was getting the sequins milled on the Othermill. (I’ll say it once, I’ll say it again until the heat death of the universe– fuck the othermill.) Considering how  much I’ve put into getting the amount of bits I’ve broken on this thing, I could have probably bought a buttload of them off Adafruit and spared me the grief.  So I etched them in hopes of cutting them off with the guillotine or band saw.Next was the second successful thing: surface mounting. Mind you it took me like three tries to get a nice solder stencil cut and made for the surface mounting, but eventually got it down, as illustrated below:

And the third success is, despite it all, my not-sequins do actually work!

Next stop was sewing, and so I wasn’t going to waste my good fabric on this since it had gone so far down to at the point I tried to get at least two of the pins hooked up on scrap to try. Looped around each hole 3 times each and stitched in the sequins. Repeated the other end with ground.

Sadly it was not a success. Not sure if the issue is the board, the chip, or the conductive thread having interference. I think in future iterations if I were to build it again, either make the board sew able as well, or wire it to some contacts that were and have it in a little pouch? The board layout itself did not help at all. Maybe even surface mount the attiny, as much as I like the option of taking out the chip and changing the blink code at will, it might work more if was more like the pouch board I theorized above.  Don’t get me wrong, I think this class was great and I know I can get a lot of use from what I learned in it. Just for this particular project, I’d probably just stick to buying  it all from Adafruit and using the Gemma proper.

 

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