Week 5 – Carla | Computational Craft

1. Nodes

When creating my nodes I wanted to experiment with different materials I’ve never used before. I wanted to have fun too, so I added some crazy ideas!

SWITCH

The first piece I used felt as a substrate and copper fabric and stretchy fabric for the different modules of the node. The switch is compound by two sides that need to be connected by folding the fabric to make the stretchy fabric connect the two small pieces of copper.

I wanted to test the switch and at the same time try a vibrating mini motor disc that fit nicely on the top of the pieces with copper tape.

LED

I created a coil using a piece of adhesive copper surface. I designed the shape using illustrator and I used a vinyl cutter to cut the desired shape and I transferred manually into a paper. I could user transfer paper because the circuit was very fragile.

Learning curve- machine defects

The material is really delicate and it requires a lot of care when manipulating. The Vinyl cutter that I used it had a damaged blade which created lots of tears on the material. I had to manually transfer and fix with patches.

2. Connectors

I wanted to give a thought to my connectors to the ones I might be using in my practice. I have two different sizes of plastic clip and a safety pin. I used copper fabric, conductive thread, heat shrink tubes and I assembled them to be resistant.