Open Universal Input Sleeve

Christine Farion really loves fabric. She apparently also loves electronics, as her Open Universal Input Sleeve, or OUIS, uses strips of conductive fabric to add touch sensitivity to a neoprene sleeve. The sleeve is adorned with several strips of conductive fabric, which form horizontal pockets with a single opening.

To use, one simply attaches crocodile clips (or alligator clips, depending on where you learned electronics) to the selected openings. Lines from the clips are attached to the inputs of an Arduino-based board, or any other device that is touch-capable. The Open Universal Input Sleeve is demoed in the second video below, which could provide a very interesting control surface in a number of situations.

Code is available in the write-up, and there's another sketch on GitHub that enables you to control a servo motor. Farion is using the ADCTouch library for Arduino interface, which allows for capacitance touch input with a single I/O pin per input, and no added resistor.

Farion lays out how her particular example works in the context of a neoprene sleeve, and how to construct it, but perhaps the most interesting part is the conductive fabric/capacitive input concept itself. She hopes that people will take what she's done and modify it in all kinds of ways. Maybe it's time to finally augment that wetsuit you've had lying around... oh the other hand, the electronics might not work properly underwater!