Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “LED fabrics at maker Faire Orlando”.
Who are you and what did you bring to maker Fair? My name is Rodney trusty um and I brought to maker Fair electronic textile specifically LED fabric LED fabric. Now this stuff looks really cool. Can you just describe for me what the demonstrations are we see here? Are these these kind of arrays of LEDs? Yes, we have three demonstrations uh. The first one is a full color RGB array, um.
The second one is a matric of red LEDs and the third are a set of Charlie Flex LEDs. So those are three different techniques used for controlling LEDs and we have all of them employed in fabric okay. Now now, if you didn’t know what you were looking at it, it would just kind of look like these are crazy wires going randomly. Can you tell me a little bit about why it’s so important in Fabrics to have like your your routes, all planned out for people who don’t who know a little bit about Electronics, maybe but not much yeah? So one of the tricks I use here is that I don’t include an LED uh resistor on the LED, as you normally would, and that’s to reduce part count and to make it smaller. Instead of doing that, I use the traces of conductive thread which have their own resistance.
So when you see these crazy routings, that’s all the resistance is being balanced so that the LEDs can all shine at the same bright, they’re still close enough and they look fantastic. Now, over here on the other side of your table, you’ve got these like garments that have lights embedded in them. This really cool, looking dress, that’s doing, patterns and stuff. Can you tell me a bit about like? Is this a service you offer or or are you doing, class is or what is it that that you do with all this? Yes, it’s a service. We offer LED embroidery, it’s normal embroidery, plus LEDs, which I believe right now. We, the only person that offer that publicly um and also we offer education as well uh to our website, digital fiber.. Us our goal really is to educate manufacturers to these techniques, so they can include them in their products and we have a line of products.
We use as an examples, okay and are those products things that people can buy to do their own. So tell me a tiny bit about like the products that you have. I saw a board over there there you were showing me yeah.
Well, I’ll give you an example: here’s one shirt uh, usually when an embroidery company wants to give it a try and give them this pattern here. It just has one LED and one battery connection. You see these two terminals there um, and this can be made in about 2 minutes off of an embroidery machine.
So uh for learning for education is like something like. This is a great place to start and we actually offer uh the learning. This pattern for free for those who want to learn and educate perfect.
Can you tell me um a little bit about this dress on the end here this looks really cool yeah, so this dress was a collaboration um with a stylist in New York um, and it was meant to show it was a murder, mystery event and the the Woman was killed in a room and you come and find the red LEDs rushing down her neck like blood, and you had to figure out who killed it. So that’s the purpose of that. I love the way it looks.
I like that. It’S kind of subtle on the LEDs and then the embroidery of the traces is what is is like visually structural, it. It looks, really cool.
I really like it. The designer helped me out with that lot. The the layout – because I did it in such a rigid black and white manner, he’s like why are all these these evenly spaced, nice, nice, so uh, one more time if somebody was was wanting to find you online.
Where could they find you? What was the website? Digital fiber. us.com, digital fiber., us and Instagram digital fiber, perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you. .