Electroluminescent Screen Printing Wearables
Today, January 18th, 2016, after months of research and development as well as many attempts and failures, I’m very pleased to announce that AMBRO Manufacturing has successfully screen printed a functioning electroluminescent pattern on a garmet. Yup, no hard parts, a flexible EL panel printed directly on fabric. We’re not talking about a sewn on component or an EL Panel stuck on a T-Shirt, this pattern was screen printed directly onto the t-shirt and it lights up.
We believe in a bright future for wearable technologies and when we decided to focus our efforts in becoming a participant in this area we took a look at what people were doing in the DIY wearable community. We’re beyond fans of companies like ADAFruit a big shout out to Limor and Phillip and Becky who have inspired us beyond belief and we’re also huge followers of the folks over at CuteCircuit.
When we looked at our friends in the community to see what they were doing we saw that the DIY movement was strong and creative and their favorite wearable item was something that could light up. So as we thought about how we could contribute in a meaningful and different way, we decided to try and provide something that could light up, but not require sewing or hard goods. NeoPixels, LED Strips and Pre-Fab EL panels are awesome, and we love them, but they all have to be sewn on, they are also “hard goods” we wanted a true soft circuit light that could be applied to any fabric. With this in mind, we focused on developing Electroluminescent Screen Printing Wearables.
Electroluminescent Screen Printing Wearables
Electroluminescent Screen Printing Wearables has been a mission of ours since the middle of 2014. In our quest to contribute to the wearable marketplace with new and innovative technologies, we’ve paid close attention to what other researches are doing. Most of the efforts that we’ve researched offer wearable solutions by means of a connected “hard device” or platform that is the brain of the garment. This brain is typically microcontroller based and can be removed before washing, although some platforms can get wet. We love this approach and we wanted to contribute something that could work in tandem with this method.
What we are showing in the attached video today is a proof of concept that the technology works. We have successfully screen printed an EL panel on this T-Shirt. I can’t begin to tell you how excited we were after hundreds of failures when this sucker finally worked. We got use to attaching the inverter and having nothing happen. But today, we saw the light!
There is a lot to be worked out from here. There are so many options and considerations and would love to hear from the community on what we should do from here. So far, here is what we’re thinking about.
We want to make sure that there is durability in the technology, meaning it can be worn daily and still function properly. So lots of testing needs to be done. It can be washed, but we’re not sure how often. So we have to do some wash testing. It stretches “a little” but we’re not sure yet of the extent to how much it can be stretched. And, we want the DIY community to have access to the technology so we need to figure out how we’re going to do that, because we know that not everyone has the equipment that we have that is necessary to manufacture this technology. Our heads are spinning a little, we’re just excited that it works.
The experiment to our knowledge, represents the first time that anyone has ever directly screen printed an EL pattern onto a T-Shirt. We believe that this is a first step in a long journey towards advancing displays for wearable technologies that are embedded into a textile.
With this announcement, I’m also pleased to announce the launch of AMBRO Labs, our newest division dedicated to R&D, discussions and experimentation in the wearables community.
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Electroluminescent Screen Printing Wearables