 Hello. It's a bit weird being back, isn't it? First talk in three years, so please be gentle. I shall try to share some good information for you. In this talk, I'm going to start off with a very brief introduction to my own work to provide some context about how I became interested in this field and also the kinds of things that I tend to make. Given that it's a hack account, I will be focusing on a lot of practical tips to help you prototype and experiment, as well as throwing in, sprinkling in some inspiring use cases from artistic and industry. I'm going to give you a whistle-stop tour of a few different parts of soft electronics. I'm going to start off with electronic embroidery, then I'm going to touch on each heck-styles before moving on to flexible circuits, soft robotics, and then the concept of softness in electronics. That's what the next half an hour is going to be full of. I hope you enjoy it. As I say, let's start off with a little introduction to myself. My day job now, I'm head of community at Crowd Supply, which is a curated crowdfunding platform for open source hardware, part of Mauser Electronics, which you may have heard of. Before I moved over to the US to do that job, I spent many years as a writer and a professional maker. I used to write about hardware for Make Magazine and Hackaday and blah, blah, blah. I also wrote a book called The Crafty Kids Guide to DIY Electronics, which is a children's book about electronics taught through craft. This was the first time that I... I'd done so of all electronics before and I'd done electronic embroidery, but this was the first time that I really went deep during the research for this book. It made me notice the switch in my audience. So I'd done, as I say, I'd done personal... Throughout my personal curiosity, I'd experimented with so-able electronics, but teaching the basic concept of electronics through craft really helped me hit a different audience. It suddenly became 90% little girls and 10% boys, and I was like, what is going on here? It's pretty interesting. By putting electronics in the context of craft, it really changed the type of people that were coming to my workshops. This is a talk at a conference, not an education conference. I'm not going to go deep into the pedagogical details, but I will say that my experiences running workshops, teaching basic electronics with a standard through-hole learn-to-solder kit versus a sewing circuit kit was completely different. It taught largely the same skills, simple circuits, parallel circuits, yada, yada, yada, but the medium completely changed the demographics and the vibe. So I thought that was really interesting. After the book was published, I worked on another project here that put technology in the context of craft, and this is the mini-moo. It's my hand on the box, hand model as well as an electronics weirdo. It's a DIY wearable instrument that I designed for Pimaroni and Imogen Heap. Kids sew, wire, code and play this glove. It's really cute. It's based on the mini-moo, which is an expensive two and a half grand midi controller, but this is $40, so it's much cheaper and a really fun thing. Again, it was a very appealing project to teen and tween girls who were experimenting with microcontrollers. Actually, the kids in the workshop who were good at sewing had a confidence boost at the beginning of the lesson, and also they got onto the coding portion and earlier than the people who were not so good at sewing, so it balanced out the classroom a little bit. That's quite fun. Moving on, and the final strand of my personal work that I wanted to introduce you to is instrument making. So when I wasn't making things for other people, I tend to make instruments or sound making devices, and I like to use experimental materials in that work from software electronics, electronic embroidery and so on, and also using architectural materials and kind of sculptural materials. So that's me in a nutshell very quickly, and hopefully that will give you some context for the rest of this talk. I've been using these technologies in my own work for a number of years, so hopefully some of my learning, my painful learning will help you avoid the pain as you start experimenting with any of these techniques. So when most people think about electronics, they think about wires and boxes and stiff, fibre-class printed circuit boards. Now, the wires in those boxes and the traces on the circuit boards are all just paths for electricity to move along, and by choosing a different type of material to make these paths, we can make all sorts of unexpected and exciting electronics. In this example, we're looking at an embroidery sampler with a very simple circuit. You've got the bottom, you've got a 3V coin cell, and then there's an LED at the top, and you can make the same circuit on a breadboard or on a printed circuit board, or just by soldering some wires together. But here, the fibre-glass, bit these over there, I'm pointing up here, here the fibre-glass of the circuit board is replaced by felt and the copper traces are replaced by curvy flowing stitches, in this case, based on, I think, a steel thread. I would say that these kind of embroidery hoops are actually really great for learning to sew conductive stuff because it keeps everything in one place, more on that in a moment. Okay, onwards. So, conductive thread, yes, a whole slide on this. So, it's the starting point for most people who want to experiment with soft electronics. So, I'm going to spend you a little time here guiding you through the basics of what exists and what you might like. So, my number one, I've got two favourites, and I've tried pretty much every conductive thread on the market, but there's a few different genres of thread. Let's take a look at some of these. So, these are just my own genres of thread. They're not, like, official technical titles, I will say that. So, there's a type of thread that's quite fluffy, and you might see strands coming off of on it, like something like this, a fluffy type of thread. Now, that kind of thread knots really well, but because it's fluffy, like this, you can see you've got all of these threads coming off of the side, and if you sew things too close together, it's like short circuit city. So, any single one of those threads touches another bit of a thread, and your circuit isn't going to work. So, a practical tip that I use here is, after you've sewn things in place, just spray it with a little bit of hairspray, and that will keep the hair, that will keep the flyaways in place. So, that's that one. And then there's another type of thread that is nowadays more common. It's a waxy type of thread. You will find that, it's sold by Adafruit, and just generally out of there. It doesn't cause short circuits, but the knots really like to come undone. So, again, a little tip here that I've learned in my years of experience is that you've got a little dab of either hot glue or clear nail varnish on your knots after you've made them to keep them from going out and done. So, you've got the fluffy, you've got the waxy, and then you've got the metal ones that are pure metal. So, this is mostly made by a company, a German company called Carl Grimm. Absolutely beautiful threads. You can solder them. All the other types of threads you can't solder. You can solder the Carl Grimm ones, but it's very brittle to work with. Very nice, though. But then, my number one favourite is a thread called Madeira, and they do you fantastic. You can use that in both the top and bottom of a sewing machine, so they're great. You can buy Madeira thread only from one place in the UK, and that's light stitches, but they're a German company, again. You can buy them on the internet as well, but they're quite hard to get hold of, but yeah. The Madeira threads are developed by a professional embroidery company, which I will have a look at later. But yeah, so those are my favourites, and those are the genres and my tips for working with each of the genres of thread. But just make sure you take care of these things, right? There we go. Let's move on. Two more very practical tips to give you, which is the things to watch out for, when you're starting off with sewing your circuits, are loose connections and dangling knots. So loose connections means that you're likely to have an incomplete circuit, so wiggling your component about maybe your circuit lights up sporadically, then you've probably got a loose connection. So you should make your connections really nice and tight and snug, and three tight stitches should do it quite nicely. Once you've got your component stitch on nice and tight, you also need to keep an eye out for knots and loose ends, which can dangle around and make short circuits. That's why you start out on these embroidery hoops, because you can flip them over really nicely and inspect the back. I'd say nine times out of ten when I've run embroidery workshops, it's been loose underneath wires that cause the first errors, so yeah, definitely watch out for those two things. So those basic tips that I just shared should start you out on embroidering electronics, and I wanted to bring this slide up here to take a look at some more advanced techniques. This is an embroidered synthesiser that I made last year, which is actually a riff on a noisemaker called a cracklebox or crackdors, sorry Dutch hackers, I find just mangled your language. But there's a Dutch artist in the 60s that made this called the Michael Weiss Fitz, and this is my version of him. The three techniques on this project that you might find useful are in the centre, you can see that there's a chip on the board, an eight-leg dip chip, and making through-hole, sorry, by adding a chip, you can either solder individual legs, which historically was what most people did, really difficult, and if your chip burns out, you've got to unpick everything as a disaster. So I made a series of flex PCBs with castellated edges that I could solder the dip chip socket into, and then sew the flex PCB onto the embroidery service, and that means you can remove the chips. Those are all on my github, I think. So that's a tip, and I don't see anyone else doing that, so I wanted to say, you should do this. You should totally do this. And then the other thing I wanted to say is pretty much any through-hole component can become a sewable component, and the way that you use it is, the way you do that is with a power of needle-nose pliers, and you just basically twist the component round and round the needle-nose pliers until it forms a loop, smush it down a little bit, and then just sew it on. You can see there, I've done that with so you just make a little loop to sew it onto a thing. That works for LEDs, that works for light sensors. You can do, you can put quite a lot of through-hole components onto a piece of embroidery with very little effort. Just a pair of needle-nose pliers. Okay, and this is a really an amazing example, this is not my work, I am not this good. This is an example of really advanced electronic embroidery from an artist called Irene Posh. This is actually a fully functional, programmable 8-bit computer made with gold embroidery and magnets. So this actually works, it flips over. Look her up on the internet, she's got loads of really interesting pieces of work. Yes, that's Irene Posh and the embroidered computer, a very cool project. Okay, so the field of electronic embroidery is like maturing at a rapid page at the moment. It used to be a bit more of a niche technology mostly practised by DIYers like me, artists, academics and so on, but nowadays there are new materials, new machines and new processes bringing them into industry. I spent two weeks with the folks at Microsoft Research just before the pandemic hit and I was lucky enough to see one of these bad boys in action. This is a ZSK industrial embroidery machine loaded up with Madeira thread which, if you were paying attention earlier is my favourite type of thread. So here you see normally I would play a video for this but it doesn't really work. So basically it's incredibly fast. This is an industrial machine that is picking and placing and creating these threads that are capacitive touch and the microcontroller you can see in the middle there is the Adafruit circuit playground express and yes, the embroidery machine did embroider that in place as well, automatically. It's like this does not convey the speed of this thing it's an industrial machine so when it's up and running it sounds like a machine gun and it's done in seconds it's incredible and it's the first time I've seen a microcontroller being placed on an industrial embroidery machine so it's very exciting still fairly experimental but it's really coming into it. So these are another thing from the industrial. These are pick and place sequence basically in order to create more advanced e-tech styles you need to have a way to industrialise them and that includes a way of mass, you know you've got to have these mass produced so you can't hand so on all of these things so lots of development at the moment is going into creating components that can be used in the embroidery industry's version of pick and place machine. So this is very cool. One more example of industrial electronic embroidery this is really cool so this is not experimental this is actually in use at the moment this is what we call moss embroidery which is a chenille fabric technique that you might see on towels and carpets and so on and tufts of the thread are pushed through a substrate and they create this mossy loop kind of effect and this is used in medicine a lot now as electrodes especially for people with sensitivities to adhesives or babies these are sewn into stretchy garments that are then placed on the body to sense various things instead of having metal electrodes so it's soft it's non-alrogenic and it's actually it's really great for all sorts of things and not only an input it doesn't only sense things this actually is used as an output for electro stimulation therapy of muscles and so on so yeah this is actually in use today so that's really cool moving on briefly to e-textiles it's used very generically it's not super useful anymore the word e-textiles but I'm using it here to refer to conductive materials that have cloth-like properties so there's two different types of fabric there's woven versus knit the difference between that is the yarn and the thread that composes them so a knit fabric is made up of one yarn looped around continuously and a woven fabric is made of intersecting yarns crossing each other at right angles to the grain so knit conductive fabric has different resistance in each direction as a result but the woven fabric is the same on each side because it's the thing and both of these fabrics are available from Adafruit if you want to have a go on them another great material you might want to have an experiment with is Velostat Velostat is pressure sensitive fabric it's much much cheaper to use than pressure sensitive sensors and you can cut it out and you can make flexible sensors with it I made meowing yoga pants with my friend Phoenix once using Velostat definitely if you're interested it's a great material to have on your radar and pretty cheap as well but first I wanted to give a shout out to various types of tapes this is my neighbour when I used to live in Berlin I made her a cape but here this is using copper tapers everywhere and you can use ordinary slog tape from hardware that's fine for putting it on fabric but actually I much prefer a fabric conductive tape which is made of nylon you can get them from Adafruit or it's also called maker tape and you can get that from brand dog gadgets and that's what I've used in this project it's really nice it's really nice to use on fabric and it's very very quick and dirty it's great for prototyping another tape I wanted to give a shout out to is Z axis tape which is what chibi Tronix uses and that's only conductive on the Z axis so it's really fun for sticker type stuff I also have an honourable melting don't do felting but I know people do and you can get conductive felting stuff so if you like stabbing things with needles to make them into shapes there are conductive materials available for you to do that I also wanted to give a shout out to Crochet, a dark art as far as I'm concerned but this is a piece of work done by Dr Anaratu ready and she does lots and lots of crochet and she argues that yarn is harder and she's done lots and lots of really interesting electronics crochet projects she did a talk at the Open Hardware Summit this year called Notty Hardware that I would highly recommend to check out as well one of the most essential things for people to be aware of when they're going into sewable electronics is you must know about the bible of sewable electronics which is the Cobra Count website this is one of their pieces they make extremely high end beautiful this is the morning dress that they made and it's a wailing speaker those are hand sewn speakers that work on that dress it's an exquisite piece of work but the website that you put there that I put there is called How To Get What You Want and it is filled with ideas and workshops and projects that they've done and really well documented so you should really be aware of that ok moving on very briefly to flexible circuit boards so the substrate of a normal circuit board is made of fiberglass which is a very stiff material in a flexible circuit board the material substrate is made out of is called captain and it's laser cut instead of rooted which means you can make some much more interesting shapes now it flex is not new it's been used in industry for a very long time but it's only made its way into the maker DIY world recently because Osh Park this US circuit board service made it available very cheaply and I've been experimenting with it so this photograph I put it up here it's by this guy called Carl Bojega and he just loads of flex experiments on YouTube so if you are interested in flex definitely check out his YouTube channel I can't do all this some of the practical reasons to use flex are obviously it flexes hello it's also very thin and it's also laser cutable and it really intricate shapes and there are a lot of design considerations for flex for example like the minimum bend radiance you've got to use teardrop shapes on your vias and pads but it's actually surprisingly easy to experiment with especially if you go via Osh Park because they've got the design rules up there so it would highly recommend and that's essential watch which is great and that's my project that used vocoder let's move on is so this is if you've been out into into the if you might have seen these people this is the same people that did the tentacles in the reef they make huge emotionally expressive robots robotic creatures in spaces like really really cool stuff and they're here so you should definitely go and check those out while you're here so conventional robots are typically made from rigid parts which makes them vulnerable to harm from bumps and scrapes and so on and these parts also make them fairly immobile they can't squeeze past things they are their shape they do what they do but soft robots are being made out of elastic and rubber and all these things and a lot of the designs are inspired by octopuses and starfish and worms and so on and this is an octopus spot which is a squishy underwater robot with eight limbs that bend in every direction and it's got a pneumatic control core it's very cool so it expands the mantle with water jets out the fluid to shoot forward and then the floppy arms stiffen in turn to crawl over things and then it can squish in between rocks to get places so this kind of technology and soft robotics is a really exciting field full of lots of challenges for different spaces it's very cool if you want to get started out with it there are a few things starting to come into the market that are suitable for DIYers this is programmable air which is an Arduino based pneumatics platform by TinkerMind there on Twitter so if you're interested in experimenting do check that out and then finally we're talking briefly about the concept of softness in electronics so this is my tentacle project I've actually resurrected it I'll take it to the perp afterwards so you can play with it I made this when I was really depressed and I wanted something soft and loving and comforting to wrap around me and do something comforting which was purring and I've just really enjoyed hang on, where have my slides gone oh no we're not watching that I haven't got time for that I haven't got time for that so this softness I wanted something to wrap around me and by putting the electronics inside of something soft it completely changed the feeling of that piece of electronics I think material choice can really change a project so this is a leather glove I've actually got this with me as well it's like an elbow length glove and it's exactly the same code as the children's glove from earlier but the material choice felt for children and then this amazing black leather for me it completely changed the vibe of the material so consider your material choices and consider what they will do to the people who are interacting with your electronics so you can do some really really interesting things okay and then I've got a bonus slide yes I've got three minutes left I've got my bonus slide amazing so I haven't even touched on the cool microcontrollers and single board computers that you might use with these kinds of things but here are my favourites if you're just getting started I would highly recommend either that or the micro bit both of them come with really nice large pin pads so even little kids can sew through them if you're moving on if you're already familiar with microcontrollers and single board computers my two favourites are I'm such a fan girl for Bella and Bella and Beagleboard are a really great combination for really amazing embedded low latency stuff and in fact somebody from Bella is actually here this weekend and I think Becky Stewart is doing a workshop on Sunday which I'm hoping to go to as well really like I love Bella for that kind of stuff another big person that I really like are the solder party boards and they're done by this Swedish guy called Arturo and he's got a lot of really interesting boards that use capitalated edges which are normally used for prototyping and breadboards but for me it's a great hook to secure my stitches in place so you put the stitch through one and then the castleated edge basically hooks it on so it's really nice and secure I love a castleated edge board for sewing and then finally two shout outs to people who are actually doing boards made for these kind of things one is the make fashion people up in Canada and they've actually got some new boards coming out which have got some fascinating stretchy platted cables very exciting about those lots of LEDs for their stuff so if you're interested in integrating LEDs into your work, check those people out and also a big shout out and a big thank you to the original made for sewables range which was Arduino it was an Arduino series of boards by Leah Buckley from MIT and she did the Lily Pad series which is open source hardware as well everything but apart from the micro bit that I've listed here is open source hardware I don't know about make fashion but many of them are open source hardware so if you're interested in actually creating some of your own stuff for this you can just go along and take a look at what they've done so I've got 20, I think that's it I've done half an hour this was like an hour long talk so I've kind of had to compress it a lot but I hope that I've given you a whistle stop tour of some of the fun stuff that can come with soft electronics with some practical tips and yeah that's me I'm very friendly you know I'm on Twitter and I chat to people so please do come and see I'm going to be outside in the robot arms with my tentacle after this if you've got any questions I'm also if anybody's got a 9 volt battery I I forgot mine if anyone's got a 9 volt battery I might resurrect so I did synthesiser this weekend as well so yeah also I'm doing a shift the last shift at the bar this evening so you can find me before or after that's it and that's me, half an hour, I'm done thank you