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I love fabric!

I really love conductive fabric, so if you’ve never used conductive fabric, I hope you sew and enjoy this Instructable.

Conductive fabric is fabric that conducts electricity. Typically there are metal strands woven into the fabric, or the metal strands might be woven with other fabrics, such as polyester. Making e-textiles, wearables, and soft circuits often use conductive fabrics for a variety of projects.

What are we making?

In this project, we are creating an Open Universal Input Sleeve. This adds touch input capabilities quickly and stylishly to your projects!

Why do you need the sleeve?

Using this sleeve, in any configuration can provide inputs for your electronic projects. You can connect it to any circuit board and - use it for touch input (native on an ESP32 board, for example), adding touch capabilities to any project. If your microprocessor board doesn’t have native touch capability, you can use a touch library (ADCTouch, I’ll provide a code example at the end of this guide) to add this to an Arduino-based board.

Once you’ve followed along to create a basic sleeve, you can modify this in infinite ways! Share your creation - what fabrics will you use? How many touch inputs? What shapes and styles will you add?

Steps for the Sleeve
This Instructable will have instructions for:

Creating the sleeve
Using the sleeve as an input device, with code for Circuit Playground / Other
Let’s jump in!”

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