#soft lab

[militantbodies]

SOFTLAB: Computational Textiles Lab - Penn State College of Arts and Architecture

[zacharyisaacsarch-blog]

SOFTLab Architects NYC

[dreamzs338]

“We Are Flower” By Galeria Melissa American design studio SoftLab attached 20,000 translucent flowers to a flexible plastic mesh to make this installation for the Brazilian jelly shoe brand's New York flagship store to reflect the shoe brand's 2014 design and marketing campaign called “We are Flowers”.

[itpabb-blog]

Muscle Wire

Jie Qi taught Sophie and me about muscle wire yesterday. She is a fantastic teacher. We had so much fun! The pleasure of mixing electronics with craft... sewing the muscle wire into place, adjusting its placement with copper tape circuits... 

To start with, we figured out how much muscle wire to use based on the voltage we were going to use (a 5v power source). Using Ohm's law (V = I / R) and research as to how many amps the muscle wire takes, (we used 0.006 HT Flexinol), we calculated that our target length was 9.6 inches. We cut our 9.6 inch pieces in half to have more material.

Then we crimped the ends of the muscle wire because it is easier to solder the crimp than to solder the tiny end of the muscle wire. 

Next we soldered the muscle wire into place on the copper tape circuit. It's important to try to have the muscle wire tightly in place so that when you apply voltage and it tightens further, the interaction is swift. 

We also sewed the muscle wire into its place in the paper so that the paper would be fully reactive rather than just pulling at either end. 

Above you see the sewn paper / muscle wire, and the copper tape circuit connecting the two pieces of muscle wire (the total length of 9.6 more or less, to resist the 5V coming in properly). 

Another circuit photo - this is the back of each panel:

Applying voltage, curling up!

See them in action!

http://youtu.be/uVn61KH2UAE