about

why soft electronics matter

Textiles and computing have been entangled from the very beginning. The Jacquard loom of 1804 used chains of punched cards to control which threads lifted on each pass of the shuttle — programmable pattern, decades before programmable computation — and those same punched cards later shaped how early computing pioneers, including Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, imagined feeding instructions to a machine. Lovelace herself described the Analytical Engine as weaving algebraical patterns “just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

The entanglement runs deeper than metaphor. When the Apollo program needed to store flight software that could survive a trip to the moon, the Apollo Guidance Computer's programs were physically woven into core rope memory: wires threaded by hand through tiny ferrite rings, where passing through a core meant a one and passing around it meant a zero. That weaving was done largely by women at Raytheon's plant in Waltham, Massachusetts — many hired from the local textile industry specifically for their needlework skill. The software that landed humans on the moon was, in the most literal sense, a textile.

The modern field of soft electronics picks that thread back up with new materials. A landmark 2011 paper in Science introduced “epidermal electronics” — circuits with thickness, stiffness, and mass matched to human skin, so they laminate on like a temporary tattoo and move with the body instead of fighting it. That mechanical matching is the core argument for the whole field: bodies, garments, and everyday objects are soft, and electronics that share their mechanics can go places rigid boards never could — continuous health monitoring, prosthetics that sense, garments that respond.

Just as important is who gets to build. Leah Buechley's LilyPad Arduino — a microcontroller and sensors in sewable packages, commercialized in 2007 — reframed electronics as a craft material, and her research found that it drew in exactly the people traditional electronics culture had been losing, particularly women and girls, by meeting them inside craft traditions that were already theirs. Soft electronics isn't just a materials question; it's a question of what counts as engineering, and whose hands count as engineers' hands. This library is written in that spirit: the felt, the thread, and the physics all taken equally seriously.

where this shows up

Outside the workbench, soft electronics is already doing real work in a handful of distinct fields.

Medical monitoring is the most mature. Textile electrodes woven into a shirt can track ECG continuously, for days at a time, in a way a clinic visit or a sticky-pad Holter monitor never could — reviews of the field consistently point to comfort and long-term wearability, not raw sensor accuracy, as the actual bottleneck standing between the lab and the clinic.

Assistive and rehabilitation devices lean on the same compliance for a different reason: a soft glove can wrap around a hand recovering from a stroke, or restore grip force to a prosthesis, in ways a rigid exoskeleton fights against rather than works with.

Haptics — the feedback side of soft electronics — shows up in VR and teleoperation gloves, translating a squeeze or a texture into something a hand can actually feel, and closing the loop that makes reaching into a virtual space feel like reaching at all.

Soft robotics takes the same softness to the scale of a whole gripper or limb: pneumatic actuators — the same kind of air-filled channel logic behind a party balloon — let a robotic hand pick up an egg, a piece of fruit, or a slice of bread without the force-control problem that rigid grippers have to solve in software.

Much of what's in this library — the pressure-matrix logic behind the velostat sensor, the vibration-motor break-out modules behind the haptic entry — traces back to open documentation that the field has been building in public for over a decade. KOBAKANT, the collaborative practice of Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi, has published exactly this kind of tutorial since 2009 on their site How To Get What You Want — free, open, and still one of the best references anywhere for building e-textile sensors and actuators by hand. This library wouldn't exist in its current form without it!

references & further reading

• Kim, D.-H. et al. “Epidermal Electronics.” Science 333, 838–843 (2011). science.org
• Buechley, L., Eisenberg, M., Catchen, J. & Crockett, A. “The LilyPad Arduino: Using Computational Textiles to Investigate Engagement, Aesthetics, and Diversity in Computer Science Education.” Proceedings of CHI (2008). dl.acm.org
• “Core memory weavers and Navajo women made the Apollo missions possible.” Science News (2022). sciencenews.org
• Shirriff, K. “Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer.” righto.com
• Buechley, L. & Eisenberg, M. “The LilyPad Arduino: Toward Wearable Engineering for Everyone.” IEEE Pervasive Computing 7 (2008). semanticscholar.org
• Ilievski, F., Mazzeo, A. D., Shepherd, R. F., Chen, X. & Whitesides, G. M. “Soft Robotics for Chemists.” Angewandte Chemie 123, 1930–1935 (2011). See also the Whitesides Research Group's overview.
• “Wearable Smart Textiles for Long-Term Electrocardiography Monitoring — A Review.” Sensors (2021). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Tiboni, M. & Amici, C. “Soft Gloves: A Review on Recent Developments in Actuation, Sensing, Control and Applications.” Actuators 11, 232 (2022). doi.org
• Perner-Wilson, H. & Satomi, M. (KOBAKANT). How To Get What You Want (2009–present) — open documentation of DIY e-textile sensors and actuators. kobakant.at