Fab Academy 2018 - Assignment 15

Wildcard Week

This years new assignment is called 'wildcard week', which means: Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process not covered in another assignment.
As we got an embroidery machine in our FabLab I decided to use this one for a textile digital fabrication process.

Embroidery Machine

In our Lab we have a Bernina B 880. This machine can be used for usual sewing and also for very artistic stitching. On Youtube you can find a bunch of tutorials that help you to work with the machine and to understand the machine's features.
One member of our team has worked with the Bernina a lot and gave us a short introduction into the machine, which included:

Turning On/Off
Lace the upper and lower thread into the machine, which looks complicated in the first place. After 3-4 times it is easy.
How to change sewing head and plate. The Bernina machine has many different ones to choose from depending on the use case. In our lab we mostly use only two plates and two heads. One set each for sewing and stitching (you can see these in the pictures underneath).
Sewing: Basic lines the machine can sew
Stitching: Basic shapes like letters

The Bernina itself also gives a lot of hints and presents tutorials while using it, e.g. when lacing the upper and lower thread. Furthermore, the machine features security

Bernina tutorial with our team member.

Side of the Bernina to turn it on, plug in the foot controller and option to plug in a USB stick..

Bernina with its touch-screen that shows tutorials and is used to control the machine. With this screen you also can design shapes while sewing and stitching. On the right side you can see in pen, which can be used to control the screen.

Lacing the lower thread. Because the thread is not visible when laced we make use a little mirror to lace the thread properly.

Sewing heads and plates.

Bernina has security features to assure and guide the user to use the correct heads and plates.

Conductive thread, that has a resistance of 300 Ohm/m. This is very important to know for the e-textiles

Button Left side: Upper Left: press this button to lace the upper thread automatically after you have put it in the needed position. Middle Left: Move the head and needle up. Middle Right: Knot the thread automatically. Lower Right: Cut the thread automatically.
Buttons right side: Press the upper button to start stitching (it turns green when it can be pressed).

Proper laced upper thread. The thread needs to form a 'V' for proper sewing and stitching.

Textile Fabrication

My goal was to fabricate a textile that has electronic parts. I want to control LED's with a button. The overall plan was doing two fabric layers, one using the stitching option of the machine and one using sewing. The stitching layer should be the artistic one and on top of the sewing layer. The sewing layer is the functional one, that includes conductive thread to connect LED's, button and battery.
My textile should somehow be usable for my final project.

Stitching

To stay in my crib theme I looked through the shapes the Bernina already offers for stitching. I found a snowflake that I liked very much and that I can use to decorate the crib. Therefore, I decided to stitch this one. I chose a colour for the upper thread, laced the thread, prepared the fabric (as shown in the picture underneath) and started stitching.

Place the fabric into a stitching frame. Remember to place supportive material under your fabric and put them together in the frame.

The Bernina comes with a lot of shapes you can already use to stitch. I chose a snowflake. To start stitching press the green button that lights up at the left of the machine.

Stitching the snowflake.

Screen of Bernina while stitching. The machine remembers where it was when pausing it, when it runs out of thread or any other problem occurs. You can also control the stitching and stitch parts again by controlling the green bar. I found this feature very handy e.g. if a part is not as you wanted it to look like. You can easily restitch that part.

Finished stitch from the back. You can rip off the white material afterwards easily.

Finished stitch from the front.

Sewing

For sewing I used conductive thread for the upper thread. I drew the basic shape of my upper snowflakes onto the fabric and sewed along these lines.

Design for conductive thread of my lower textile part. This will be put underneath the stitched snowflakes.

When lacing the lower thread for sewing you need to do it differently compared to stitching. Detailed information will be shown on the screen of the machine.

Tutorial on the machine screen.

Sewing the fabric. Assure that that fabric is flat when you sew, otherwise the thread will look ugly.

Hold onto the material while sewing.

Testing the Conductive Circuit

Testing the lower fabric was very important as I had to find out how much resistance the conductive thread has at certain points of the sewed lines. I used a mulitmeter to measure these. In the end I decided to use three LED's with a white light (also to stay in the topic of crib and snow) that light up the snowflakes on the upper fabric.

Finished textile with the sewed conductive thread.

Testing the conductive thread with the LED's in terms of how much resistance is needed and how much voltage to let them shine.

Testing switching LED on/off.

Final Assembling

Finally, I put all parts together. I sewed the LED's manually to the fabric. Then I connected the switch and battery to them and let the snowflaked shine. Electronic parts I used:

Three white LED's
Conductive thread with resistance (ca. 200 Ohms resistance before the first LED to assure it does not break)
Switch to turn on/off LED's
9 Volt battery with 20mA

Final sewed e-textile from the back. LED's got attached by attaching them with conductive thread into the circuit.

Finished e-textile, with the switch you can turn on and off the LED's.

Finished textile.