Abstract
A hardware and software platform is presented enabling the design, and realisation via printing, of smart fabrics. The cultural and creative industries are an important economic area within which designers frequently utilise fabrics. Smart fabrics offer further creative opportunities to the cultural and creative industries, but designers often lack the required specialist knowledge, in electronics, software and materials, to produce smart fabrics. The software platform offers the ability to perform design, layout and visualisation of a smart fabric using a library of standard smart fabric functions (e.g. electroluminescence) so specialist expertise is not needed. Operation of the smart fabric can be simulated, and parameters can be set for smart fabric control electronics, which consists of standard circuit board modules. The software also provides driver code for the hardware platform to print the smart fabric. The hardware platform consists of a bespoke dispenser printer; functional inks are deposited via a pneumatic syringe controlled by the driver software, allowing bespoke rapid prototyped smart fabrics to be printed. Operation of the software and hardware system is demonstrated by the realisation of an interactive smart fabric consisting of electroluminescent lamps controlled by a proximity sensor. The modular electronics are used to control the smart fabric operation using embedded code generated by the software platform. For example, the blink rate of the electroluminescent lamp can be adjusted by the proximity of a hand. This control is achieved by the use of intuitive drop-down menus and input/output selections by the creative user. At present, the platform allows the design, print and implementation of smart fabrics incorporating the functions of colour change, electroluminescence, sound emission and proximity sensing. The platform can be expanded to add additional functions in the future and the printer will be compatible with new inks developed for screen and inkjet printing.
Highlights
Smart fabrics are conventional fabrics incorporating electronic functionality for sensing, actuation or appearance enhancement
The results show that the designs can be converted from drawings into printed devices correctly and that the visualisation tool can be used to program the electronics to provide different functionality of the fabric depending on the desired application
The design is printed using the hardware platform which is a bespoke dispenser printer directly driven by the software platform
Summary
Smart fabrics (or textiles) are conventional fabrics incorporating electronic functionality for sensing, actuation or appearance enhancement. Berkeley University have dispenser printed onto a flexible polyimide substrate creating a thermoelectric generator,[9] lithium-ion batteries and an electrochemical capacitor[10] and a zinc ink deposited on silicon provided the proof mass in an accelerometer.[11] Dispenser printed smart fabrics have been demonstrated for the functions of sound emission,[12] electroluminescence,[13] colour change,[14,15] stretch sensing[16] and proximity sensing.[17] each of these demonstrators was printed as single devices with individually programmed printer paths for each layer – this is unsuitable for the targeted creative industry users because of the complexity involved and the specific printing knowledge required. These design elements provide interactivity via proximity and touch, light emission, colour change and sound emission
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