leron’s crib

The GlowScarf is a scarf that reacts to your cellular phone; when you receive a call the scarf begins to glow. By giving the cell phone’s ring an external signal, the wearer is free to embrace the status of being in-demand, without necessarily needing to answer the call. The glow of the scarf says, “I’m important”; the wearer can then decide to take the call or to merely bask in its glow.

The detection of the cell phone’s ring will be accomplished with a simple circuit (diagram here) which will then activate the glow. Initially I will use the circuitry from a novelty pen, to ensure operability and robustness for the initial prototype(s).

My current plan is to knit the scarf myself. I am interested in light colored and iridescent yarns that will enhance the glowing effect.

In order to create the lighting effect, I plan to use fiber optics in conjunction with super-bright LEDs. I looked into using EL wire, but the general consensus is that it is difficult to work with (also expensive), and probably not the most conducive for the comfort factor I’m looking for. Instead, I will use several strands of thin fiber optics which will be etched (most likely with a laser cutter) in order to refract the light along the length of the fiber. I have seem samples of this type of fiber optic application, and it produces a subtle yet noticeable effect. I have not determined how many LEDs or how many fiber optic strands I will need.

More illustrations to come.

(related links can be found here)

For this week’s project the assignment was to hack a toy or some other piece of consumer electronics. I decided to incorporate an X10 wireless home automation remote control into this trucker hat (which I bought from a homeless guy at SXSW for $2). The idea came from wanting to do something with the gesture of tipping the hat — so I put soft switches on the corners of the bill; when you squeeze the bill you can turn on (or off) whatever device is plugged into the wireless transceiver.

There wasn’t a whole lot of hacking involved — basically soldering some magnet wire to the contacts of the switches in the remote. I created some simple soft-switches with conductive fabric and a leather barrier between each piece, et voila.

In the section ‘On the Blood and Us’, Valery raises questions surrounding the essence of life; What if our blood were pumped in directly without all the prerequisite processes of nutrition, oxygenation, etc, were removed and only the system of the blood remained? It’s sort of a paradox, to think about it; our blood system is certainly the ‘central’ and most important, but only because it exists to replenish and satiate the rest of our organism.

I’m reminded of Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, where he argues that in the future our bodies will be replaced by hardware smart enough to emulate their functions. The question boils down to, what is life? What is our essence that makes us ‘us’ — is it biological, or spiritual, or somewhere in between?