Multitouch Fabric

The capstone project of Janette Hernandez (Electrical Engineering BSc) and Maria Contreras (Electrical Engineering BSc), a smart fabric that can respond to touch input.

Fabric Design

The Multitouch Fabric is composed of several components:

• Resistive Thread
• Non-Conductive Thread
• Neoprene
• Eeonyx
• Perfboards
• Adafruit METRO Mini

The design consists of three different layers. In order to distinguish between all three layers, we will call the bottom layer Rows, middle layer Eeonyx, and the top layer Columns.

• The Rows are composed of 4, 4.5 inch rows of conductive thread facing up with non-conductive thread facing below.

• The Eeonyx is a resistive fabric that its electrical resistance decreases under mechanical stress, such as pressures. This fabric possesses surface resistance between 10 Ohm/sq and 10 billion Ohm/sq.

• The Columns are composed of 4, 4.5 inch rows of conductive thread facing down with non-conductive thread facing up.

These three layers are sandwiched together, where the Columns and Rows are connected to pins 4-11 on the METRO Mini. Pins 8-11 will read (digitalRead) which will either read 1 or 0 (High or Low) on the serial monitor.

Visualization

The visualization uses raymarching to render modulating curves that vibrate and change shape according to the position of the user's fingers.

Data Flow

During the application update loop data from the Arduino is read from the serial port, and passed to uniform buffers in Vulkan, and we show the next image in the swapchain.