Micheal is hard at work preparing seamstressing material type things, so I, MattMoss the electronics guy, will cover some of what we've done for our first prototype.
For our project we're largely reusing some of the components from Dr. Hammond's initial prototype. What this primarily means is that we're going to be using a Teensy 2.0 development board. This dev board breaks out most/all the pins of an ATMega32, and exposes a simple USB interface for uploading programs. It's also arduino compatible, which simplifies the development.
In this first week we experimented with getting it running, making LEDs blink, and, most importantly, getting an initial prototype of the system running. The core concept for our touchpad implementation is the use of rows and columns of conductive fabric to form a button pad. Touch is then used to close circuits which can be detected by the Teensy. Its similar in concept to many button matrix applications, such as the circuit shown at the right.We implemented a simple version of this with wire hotglued to foam, and the output button displayed on an LED array to ensure that everything'll work right. The full (and working) prototype is pictured below. Ain't it wonderful?
Next week I'll be working on getting Bluetooth to work with an Android App.
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