Wearables - Building Open Source Hardware - page 130

Figure 9.1 First prototype LilyPad set.
Everyone, especially young women, was excited about the medium.
Unfortunately, the kit pieces were bulky and not terribly attractive. I
wanted to work with smaller surface-mounted components, but I wasn't
able to make fabric circuit boards that were durable enough. In
mid-2006, I realized that if I built my circuits in a different way—using
traces that looked like flower petals—I could make robust fabric PCBs
for tiny electronic components. The first “LilyPad” was born ( Figure
9.2 ) .
(Source: Images CC-BY-SA Leah Buechley)
Figure 9.2 First LilyPad.
Around the same time, I discovered a new project called Arduino
whose software made it much easier to program the AVR microcontrol-
lers I used in my kit. I made a few tweaks to the open source Arduino
software to make it work with my boards. With new pieces and the new
programming environment, my workshops improved tremendously.
Students built beautiful, funny, and gorgeously crafted projects—a
fortune-telling tank top, a handbag with a twinkling map of the stars, a
hoodie that glowed in greeting.
I got tired of soldering fabric PCBs, and I wanted more people to be
able to play with e-textiles. In 2007, on a whim, I brought one of my
fabric boards to a small electronics company that had just started up in
Boulder. SparkFun said it would be happy to collaborate with me on a
commercial version of my kit, and after a few months of prototyping,
we released the first commercial LilyPad set ( Figure 9.3 ).