Team Blinky

Come Blink With Us!

We’re a little group of makers committed to learning by building, and sharing with others!

We are Liza, Alex and John, and we’re getting together with The Greene Space at New York Public Radio (where two of us also work) for a Family Maker Day.

Come learn, build and have fun making blinky circuits!

Our hope is that you walk away with something you’ve made together, and with the confidence to explore more on your own at home.

Let’s Stay in Touch

Embroidered LED Ornaments!

Making presents is the best! For Christmas this year, I made a few electric embroidered ornaments for the fam. This one is a suuuper simple circuit that uses resistive yarn as a sensor to control the brightness of the LEDs. When you pull on the yarn (or in this case “road”), the LEDs (or windows) become brighter. So no matter how long the road home is, the lights are always there to guide you :)

Make Your Own Touchscreen Sensitive Gloves!

Do not buy those touch sensitive gloves! They’re way expensive to buy, but cheap and easy to make yourself. Here’s a tutorial from Family Circuit, the web series from yours truly.

This is about the simplest intro project ever if you're just getting into e-textiles. These gloves work because they extended the conductivity, or capacitance, of your skin to the screen so it's just like your finger is touching it. When your finger touches the screen, it changes an electromagnetic field around the screen. There is a sensor that measures this, then tells the processor where this fluctuation is on the screen and what to do with it (type a letter, draw a line, drop some beats, etc).

Hacks/Hackers Workshop!

I love a good excuse for a project. Not only because I love making things, but I like designing experiences and if they have deadlines and an audience, even better. This project was specifically designed for me to wear at our Cooking with Hardware panel. 

After a few TeamBlinky conversations around personal data, bio-sensing, and storytelling, I began brainstorming a piece of DIY wearable technology that would reveal what I knew, but no one else can generally tell: my stress level during a round of public speaking. That’s right, I will be showing the audience whether or not I am feeling overly aroused during our talk.

Team Blinky really started the moment Liza lit up and said "You haven't seen LED Throwies?!?!" Soon, the Throwies were lighting up, then they were flying through the air, then ::THWAK:: they stuck to the steel apartment door. Cool!

We love Arduinos! They are awesome little computers that bridge the gap between the digital world and the physical world. And they're easy to code and build with.

There are lots of places to learn about Arduinos, led by the excellent Ardiuno site itself. There are also great tutorials at Sparkfun and Adafruit. 

John's wife Kristin wanted a way to monitor her monthly cycles -- and the feelings of stress that came with her approaching period. So he built her an ambient indicator in the form of a bedside lamp (which she loves).