I made four pressure sensors this week, but I originally planned on making them through sewing conductive thread into cotton cloth, but it didn’t work out well at all. I think maybe I need to find thicker and better quality cloth than the ones I bought from Michaels. Or maybe I just need to practice my sewing because it was painful how awful they turned out.

So I then decided to just go back to paper and cooper tape. I remembered that pressure sensors worked better working with weaving conductive materials together rather than just having two large conductive pieces with a resistive material in between. I ended up making strips of paper and copper tape and weaved them together to forming this:

I glued them together to form a square and then added some velostat in between as the resistive material and created four pressure sensors. It worked really nicely I think, but I noticed when I tested that some electricity would already go through it without adding any pressure. Maybe the velostat layer had to be perfectly cut to the size of the square to cover up all of the cooper tape connections or maybe I needed a higher resistive material. Overall I am really happy with the results and can’t wait to make more sensors! Goodbye buying sensors and hello crafting sensors!

– Aaron Lee