In light of what’s happened with the copper foil, I’ve been looking into conductive fabric. Honestly, this is what I should have been doing from the beginning, but I guess I’m too used to thinking of electricity as going with metal, wires, and solder. I found a company called LessEMF which sells all kinds of electrically conductive fabric. I’m particularly interested in what they have labeled Stretch Conductive Fabric, and secondarily the Pure Copper Polyester Taffeta Fabric. They sell a sampler package for $10 that contains 2″x3″ swatches of all of their materials, which I have ordered. Once it shows up, I’ll see which performs the best.
My primary concern is that I need to be able to reliably attach the sensor lead wires to the pads. My ideal solution would be to solder, but depending on the composition of the fabric, that might be impossible. Barring that, I could try using conductive thread, though that might not work. Perhaps a combination of conductive thread and an epoxy bead to hold things in place might work. I’ll have to see how the surface conductivity of the fabric is.
Unfortunately, the sampler package hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe it will come tomorrow.
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