Touchpad Pants at Maker Faire NYC

I am onsite right now at the NY Hall of Science. I was here yesterday for the Open Hardware Summit which lit my brain on fire... but it was a calm and quiet lull before the storm compared to what is happening now. There is the sound of power tools and a smell in the air of cut lumber, machine oil, and spraypaint. Tons of familiar faces from Maker Faires past. I already ran into two guys from Techshop, and am sitting a few feet from the Life-Size Mousetrap. My friends are frantically bolting together a giant mobile squid and I am left wondering how much RF interference there will be tomorrow, and how much it would take to sink the project. I had to repair the video connector with pliers but the LCD screen they have on the stage where we will be presenting works with my machine and is bigger than I am.



It has been crazy getting ready for this, and there is some functionality that we had to give up on, but I am overall feeling very calm and pretty much ready. It has been a crazy journey of about two months since I conceived and began working on this project and despite the protesting murmurs of my inner perfectionist I am really pleased with how far it came and what we were able to accomplish. I wanted to take a few moments and shout out to everyone who helped me with it because it sure took a village! Without people promising support it is a lot more intimidating to start something so far outside of what I normally do.



Touchpad Pants

"by" Rachel Lyra Hospodar / Medium Reality



in collaboration with:



Jon Ferran - concept and circuit design

Jason Asbahr / Monstrous Games - concept, application, and software

Christine Hodges - software

Michael Shiloh - Arduino instruction

R. Miloh Alexander - electronics assembly and Zigbee troubleshooting

Mitch Thompson - Zigbee expertise

D. P. Chang - lending expensive hardware

Rich Humphrey - general hackery and awesomeness

Tara Ocon & Liz Carena - wearing the silly thing while I talk about it!

Noisebridge - source of amazing and supportive people and environment. and soldering tools. and distractions.



Of course I also owe amazing thanks to Sherry Huss, Dale Dougherty, and O'Reilly in general, for providing an awesome venue for crazy projects and believing that I would pull it off.




Now who wants to help me make a pants keyboard?

see what people wear

Whenever I feel stuck I like to see what people are doing Out There in the World. Sometimes the studio feels like too much of a vacuum. A friend just turned me on to this style blog:

http://jakandjil.com/blog/

which inspires me to share my favorites as well.

http://facehunter.blogspot.com/ all over the place, london-centric

http://www.hel-looks.com/ helsinki

http://stilinberlin.blogspot.com/

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ all over the place, new york centric

http://nymag.com/nymag/strategist/look/archive/ i don't want to like it but i always do.