This week we met with our faculty advisor, Melissa, who gave us some advice on the electronic design of our jackets. She helped us choose Sophie and Summer's sewable micro controllers, the Lillypad USB plus along with 850ma Lipo batteries that will charge through via the micro controllers through USB. She advised us to use regular leds for our fiber optics and modify the legs with pliers to sew them into the jackets. We talked about the limitations of conductive thread, and the possibility of using silicone thread to reach long distances across the jackets to prevent shorts or electronic failure. She also told us that our designs were super simple circuits and that were very much within our capabilities of circuits and Arduino programming.
Melissa encouraged us to think about how we could take this project farther past the end of this semester. She showed us a company that makes similar jackets to ours and encouraged us to think about a potential end user and how we could reach those customers. Overall she liked our ideas and was excited to see us create them.