Engineering Projects/Illuminate Clothing/Howard Community College/fall2012/p1-504-gtdm

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Project documentation focuses on how the team organized itself to tackle the unknown. This is a creative process. The details learned should be captured in tutorials. Project documentation should focus on how the team organized itself to step out into the unknown. Failure is common. The single most effective way to increase engineering respect is to document failures in a creative way that stimulates, inspires and helps others continue the project. Projects are never done. There are always loose ends. There are always decisions that might have been made more clearly. There are always other alternatives that might have been considered. None of this stuff appears in a tutorial. It does appear in the team documentation.

Electronic Sections Expected

Problem Statement

Create a clothing design with battery powered LED lights that are sound reactive along the sleeves of a hooded sweatshirt and create clothing-implementing EL-Wire, while making the garment versatile, safe,and washable.

Team Members

Summary

We discussed our project design and the material's list. We agreed to use a women's small seize sweatshirt as a medium. The sound reactive LED lights will be connected on the upper sleeves, while the EL wires will be incorporated with the original sweatshirt design. We will try to make a "ENES - 100" design with the EL wires at the front center of the sweatshirt. We began building and connecting the LED wires. The sound reactivity has not been tested as this point.

Poster

Story

We decided to create rows of LED lights along the sleeves. The LEDs are connected in series of two that are parallel to the other two, for a total of four LEDs in each group, Figure 2. The LED groups are connected to each other by the positive pin of the LED, which leads down to the power supple (3.5 Volts). The negative pin of the LED is connected to the output pin (middle) of the transistor (TIP 31B)Figure 1 and Figure 3.

The left and right wires of the audio jack are connected to the input (left) pin of the transistor and the ground (right) pin of the transistor, which is used to ground the audio jack and to connect the circuit to the negative side of the power supply Figure 4.

If everything is connected properly, the LEDs should respond to sound if plugged into the audio source. There can be two possible audio sources by using the "Y-plug", which allows for one audio input, and two audio outputs. This means that LEDs will be reactive to the audio played in the headphones or speakers.

Decision List

1. Our group made the collective decision of not only using EL-Wire for our project, but additionally incorporating the use of LED lighting that is sound reactive and built into the sweatshirt. This not only implements more of a multi-structural design, but also is more innovative because it had not been invented previously. EL-wire clothing in itself has already been made.

2. Originally our group was planning on converting a sound reactive LED system that was embedded in a car and required the conversion of an outlet system to 9 Volt battery. We made the decision that this would not only be too difficult to implement, but also not cost efficient. We found a way to build our own sound reactive LED system that would be lighter weight and cheaper in cost.

Material List

1. A white women's hooded sweatshirt. Quantity: 1. Size: extra small. Cost: Contributed by a project team member. It was donated by a project team member.

2. EL wires. Quantity: 1 red EL wire, 1 orange EL wire, 1 purple EL wire, 1 green EL wire. Size: approximately 24 inches. Cost: Donated by the instructor.

3. Universal Breadboard (Circuit Board). Quantity: 1. Size: Predetermined size small. Cost: $9.99.

4. General Electric Wires. Quantity: 30 wires. Size: 5 inches. Cost: Donated by the engineering lab.

5. Portable Battery Pack for EL Wire. Quantity: 4. Size: 4' by 2' inches. Cost: $7.99/pack.

6. Audio plugs. Quantity: 2. Size: 1' by 0.2' inches. Cost: Donated by project team member.

7. Sewing kit. Quantity: 1. Size: Standard. Cost: Donated by project team member.

8. Dental floss. Quantity: 1. Size: Standard. Cost: Donated by project team member.

9. LED light bulbs. Quantity: 50. Size: Standard - large size. Cost: ??????.

10. Miniplug Stripped. Quantity: 1. Size: Standard. Cost: $4.69

11. AA batteries. Quantity: 2. Size: AA. Cost: Approximately $7.00 for a pack of 4 AA batteries on Amazon

Software List

We used the United Sketch : Fritzing Software to create a model of the LEDs and transistors.

Time

Tutorials

This is a Youtube video we used as a tutorial to make our LEDs. How to Make an LED Circuit

Next Steps

The next steps of the Illuminated Clothing project are implementing safety precautions, reducing fire hazards, and making the illuminate clothing waterproof. In terms of the visual design, additional LED lights and EL wire can sown in harmony with the current design. Also, additional accessories such as hats, pants, skirts can be incorporated with the hoody-sweatshirt design.

The future materials that are needed to continue this project are at least 3 batter packs for the 3 EL wire and 2 batter packs for the LEDs; need to purchase 3 P-3 battery packs with female connectors from http://www.elwirepros.com/p3-inverte3.html

After extensive research we've concluded that incorporating batteries into clothing can be deemed as safe as long as the voltage stays below 12V. Since we are using triple A batteries which are below 5V, lower than most children's toys, risk of electrocution is slim to none. Although we don't recommend it, you could jump into a river if you'd like and you would feel little less than a small buzz. Not only that but you wouldn't have to worry about High Frequency EMF radiation. Again, because the clothing is operating at such small levels of power the frequency emitted by the batteries is below 0hz; radiation is of no concern.

One of the safety hazards that we will have to worry about is heat. Small "hot spots" could potentially be created if the wiring is done wrong or if we place to many batteries or conducting wires in a small vicinity. Taking this into account we concluded that easy measures can be taken to avoid burning and fire from these "hot spots" such as organized planning of where wires and batteries are layed out throughout the hoodie. Secondly, we could easily incorporate heat resistant or even flame retardant cloth where batteries would be layed out upon, or maybe as an entire layer to be 100% safe. Readily available technologies have paved the way for our EL wire/LED clothing safety.