Electronic Birthday Cake Embroidery Is Sew Awesome
Becky Stern used advance embroidery techniques and Bare Conductive's Touch Board to make this birthday display.
When Becky Stern and Estefannie, of Estefannie Explains It All, found out they (nearly) share the same birthday, they of course decided to do a gift-exchange collaboration. For Stern’s part, she made a birthday cake embroidery display, with cats, little pictures of Texas, and a cake with candles. On top of each candle are self-flickering LEDs, which produce a nice effect by themselves.
The display features a 3D-printed frame, and is an impressive display in itself of what you can do with illustration skills, an embroidery machine, and a series of LEDs. Stern wasn’t done, however, and sewed a Bare Conductive Touch Board to the back. This allowed for an easy way to power the LEDs via the board's USB power input,
This also gave it the ability to play songs off of its built-in SD card, with sound output is through an amplifier and speaker. An RTC module is even used to keep track of Estefannie’s birthday so a special song can be played on that date. For control, Stern ran lines from the Touch Board to bolts that extend to the outside of the picture frame, which take advantage of the Bare Conductive board’s capacitive interface feature.
You can see the build process in the video below, including opening Estefannie’s gift – a sort of "disaster terrarium" – at around the 9:00 mark. The whole thing looks like a lot of fun, and could certainly provide inspiration for other advanced “electro-embroidery” projects!