Sewing on to a PCB is one of the ways to connect textiles to electronic as we know from xslab, Leah Buechley or the Bling Cricket. To do it with Arduino I made this shield for the mini:
On the frontside you have the controller and a power source
the actual board layout sits on the backside. I connected the reset to 5V to prevent random resets.
Once I tested it I will blog the eagle files.
Today we put in snap buttons as connection to a textile bus into the prototypes.
We figured out that we have to work with straight lines to connect to a textile bus. The snap buttons are a neat thing for the children to work with. For the production it means a lot of manual labour. The idea was to have snaps on the textile pcb and on the patches plus a snaps set with tool to put them in in the toolbox. Unfortunatly the snap boxes with the tools are really expensive.
Today we were working on a textile pcb prototype. We even finished the first one.
The technique used is embroidery and we worked with Siw’s sewing maschine. We used a very thin copper wire and fixed it with a zick zag stitches.
That is how it worked:
We started by sketching
and transfered the sketch to the fabric
Did the embroidery
and there we go. Now we put in the Arduino mini and fix it with a wire wrapper tool (and maybe a little bit of soldering)
Although we agreed on working on a textile pcb, we tried ease the connection between a “regular” pcb and textile materials (e.g. conductive yarns). One solution is to sew directly to the pcb (as you can do it on the very nice Bling Cricket)but it has to be done neatly what is quite hard for a lot of children (and adults 
). At our meeting in Sweden we could work together on different solutions.
The Textilhögskolan has a lot of very advanced machines but for today we sticked with snap-button and button tools.
What came out is a pcb that has snap buttons pressed on.
