Sorry, this week’s blog post will be super underdeveloped, as I had to move apartments all week and only got started on this today. Some brief notes:
I originally wanted to put the Lilypad LEDs all up and down both sides of my jacket’s zipper, and either have an elevator light sort of effect (where the LEDs would only light up as the zipper passed them) or have the whole series light up when the jacket was fully zipped. Unfortunately, my LiPo seemed to have gotten damaged in the move, and my other LiPo recently had the same issue with the wires detatching (and I’m too scared to try and solder it back), so I had to resort to the coin cell holder. That plus my lack of time made for a bare-minimum project.
I haven’t made a project with a zipper switch in a couple years, and I forgot how tough it is for the zipper to get over the thread if you make it too bulky. In retrospect, I should have made the contacts a lot neater, to allow for the zipper to glide over better. As it is right now, the zipper has a lot of trouble moving smoothly, and the effect suffers as a result.
I hate this thread. I usually use adafruit conductive thread (can’t remember if it was 2 ply or 3 ply), but since I ordered from sparkfun, I figured I’d try their thread out. It was constantly kinky and knotty (and not the good kind), and it even broke my poor needle threader thing :( will only use as a last resort from now on.
