This week assignment was a lot of fun! The premise was to measure something and display the results... haha ... I have a motto saying that : when you go shopping (at the pharmacy, hardware store, grocery store, H&M ->wherever) the multimeter is your best friend - lots of mundane manufactured parts of daily products present some interesting electrical characteristics that can be exploited to create some interesting circuits and custom sensors. I've been collecting such parts for a while now (poppers, electrical belts, conductive gels, yarns and paint pigments) and decided to use one of them for this week's assignment. I decided to use the carbon filament to create a moustache! - it was Halloween, no?! (I'm also planning to fab the whole mask (nose + glasses) in a near future)

The carbon filament thread is nothing more than carbon fiber and it is used in lots of fabrication domains. It is notably exploited in composite material to reinforce structures because of its amazing strength-to-weight ratio and low weight. Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) used in airplanes, motorcycles and F1 bodies are examples of such composite materials. Carbon fiber is also utilized to make guitar and violin strings. In the clothing industry carbon filament thread are employed to strengthen yarns and fabricate non-static clothing - and of course sensitive moustaches!

The pcb was straight forward to implement. Since the carbon thread offers variable resistance when manipulated we designed a simple voltage divider and sample the output of the division. The (not so) tricky part was the connectors which must interface with soft materials - the thread. No sewing was needed for this project in order to embed the pcb so alligator clips worked out just fine.