DANIEL YIN

Electronic textiles (e-textiles), is an emerging field of design engineering aiming to add value to wearable fabrics often in the form of communication, transformation, and evaluation. Often times, this is achieved by adding digital electronic components to soft fabrics in a nonintrusive way.

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E-textiles are particularly well-suited to wearable computing applications as textile sensors and circuitry are more comfortable against the body than circuits printed on hard fiberglass or compressed paper substrates. However, while techniques for textile-based sensors and power and signal busses have been developed, currently for all but the most basic system, at some point the textile will need to interface with a hard component such as an integrated circuit on a chip. While there is ongoing work such as the yarns produced by Nottingham Trent University to reduce the size of hard components so that they can be integrated indistinguishably into a textile, soft electronic technologies are still far from achieving high computing power, memory, power storage and so on. This project focuses on applications where it is accepted that hard components will need to be worn, but explores ways to naturally fit them in. It will also focus on applications that require multiple isolated conductive paths between the soft textiles and hard electronics.

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A proposed solution is a prototype Integrated Circuit Button (ICB) inspired by clothing buttons that acts as a housing and point of interconnection between a circuit on a rigid PCB and a textile circuit. Below presents the design decisions that have informed iterations of the prototype button and show the button in the context of holding a microcontroller.

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Hard components have been a part of fashion since the 13th century, mainly in the form of a button used to attach one half of the fabric to another. To this day they are still found on many shirts, coats, pants, and purses.

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Beyond the comfort of the wearer, the life cycle of the worn circuit, including how the circuitry could be made robust against future changes was considered. This could include the need to upgrade firmware or modify a subsection of a circuit. On a more daily basis, the concerns include washability and the ability of the garment to function as a desirable piece of clothing, even when not powered.

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A functional prototype of a smart button in the form factor of a men's shirt button housing a 32-bit SAM Microcontroller and its power regulating circuit was produced and tested against normal shirt buttons under extreme conditions.