Plush Game Controller Using Conductive Fabric & Flora

Adafruit has made an oversized plush game controller that works by using conductive fabric and a Flora board. With this two, they can stitch up a capacitive touch sensing circuit. Here, the controller acts like a computer keyboard that allows to play all favorite games on emulator sites online. This easygoing project is an all-sew project with no batteries and therefore it makes great for beginners and even for kids to try.

Figure 1: Plus Game Controller

A PDF pattern is esp. made for constructing this plush controller that can be downloaded and printed and tiled into four pages together. A small piece of woven conductive fabric is ironed with the paper on back. Then the desired shape is cut out that is necessary for the controller buttons. The buttons will be four directional with two option buttons and two round action buttons.

The paper on back is peeled from interface and then the pieces of conductive fabric is ironed to some grey fuzzy fabric. The Flora on the fabric s placed and then following the pattern, a water-soluble embroidery marker is used to sketch the traces that will connect the Flora pads to the conductive fabric buttons.

Make sure that these traces are as far apart from each other as possible so they don’t accidentally trigger each other’s capacitive touch sensing. The Embroider connection follows the lines that is just drawn and wrapped several times around the Flora pads and into the conductive fabric. Finally, it is knotted, sealed and the thread is cut out at the back.

The circuit is removed from the embroidery hoop and creases are ironed. Damp paper towel is used to make the traces disappear. Now, the code is pasted into the Adafruit Arduino IDE or it can be downloaded from github. Finally, the Plushie is constructed according to the pattern.

Now, the controller is just plugged into the computer and you can start playing your favorite games online. You can have fun playing the games here and also you can customize the Arduino sketch to trigger any keyboard actions according to your priorities as it is completely customizable to whatever keyboard-interaction game you can find.

The codes, video, and other details are available on the following website