HOWTO i*CATch Garment!!

Step 1

Prepare your material. You should have 1 piece of blue or grey denim cloth and 1 piece of white "wiring" cloth with wires inside and connective snap buttons. You may add other accessories (such as buttons, etc) as you please.

Step 2

Design your own shirt. For example, here's a pattern to make a sleeveless vest that opens down the middle.

Step 3

Attach the white "wiring" cloth to your garment with double-sided adhesive tape (雙面膠紙). You can fold and crumple up the wiring cloth in any way you like, provided that you observe the following conditions:

• The buttons on the wiring cloth are the connectors for your lights, sensors, batteries, whatever. So make sure that they're facing in the right direction! That is, if you want your lights on the outside, be sure that your buttons are facing the outside of the shirt! You can cut holes in the denim and let the buttons poke through, but do not cut holes in the wiring cloth!
• If you want to, you can even stitch the wiring cloth to the denim instead of taping it. But before you do that, please come and talk to us. There're some parts of the wiring cloth that cannot be damaged or the shirt won't work. We'll tell you where your needle can go and where it can't.

Step 4

The buttons on the wiring cloth are used to connect the sensors and lights, and they also conduct electricity and are used to send signals to and from the main board. Cut small holes in the denim shirt where your buttons are supposed to appear on the surface, and poke the buttons through. Make sure that none of the cloth "threads" cross the front of the buttons, or you might get a bad connection.

Step 5

You can now plug the devices and battery and main board onto the shirt. You can also decorate your shirt in any way you wish. For example, we've added a pocket to the front of the shirt with some of the leftover material. Just be careful not to damage the wiring cloth!

Step 6

Now we need to try and control our shirt with the computer. Your program will run on the computer, which will then send commands over to the shirt using Bluetooth. So, first, connect the Bluetooth dongle to the i*CATch main board. If you're using a desktop, plug in your Bluetooth adapter. If you're using a laptop, make sure that your Bluetooth is on.

Step 7

Put in your batteries. Make sure that your batteries aren't run down -- Bluetooth tends to eat up a lot of electricity.

Step 8

Using the Bluetooth setting interface on your computer, pair your computer with your robot. (We're showing an example of an interface -- yours may vary depending on your Bluetooth adapter's brand.) Check under the list of Bluetooth devices for your robot (for example, the robot here is called SAM_CATch), and record the name of the communication channel that is associated with the robot (in this case the name is "COM40") for your program.

Step 9

You can now control your shirt from the computer. The following shows a simple program that blinks the lights on the shirt. Make sure that you type in the correct name for the communications channel in the robot.connect() program statement (in line 5 in the given example).

Step 10

To run your program, open up a command prompt and cd into the folder that your program is saved in. Run your program in the usual way. In this example, the name of the program is called garmentDemo.py. (Note: the first time you run your program and your computer tries to connect to the robot, it may ask you for the password for the main board. The default password is 1234.) Once you are connected, your program should start running.