Most years, Halloween sort of sneaks up on me — I don’t know what I’m going to do till the last minute, and I don’t bother thinking up a costume till the week before. But then I have to come up with something that I think is clever, or I’ll be sorely disappointed with myself, so I spend an entire day sorting out the minutia of whatever costume I pick. For my space drag costume, that was stringing together CDs with dental floss to make a skirt; for scrabble, it was gluing 225 little squares of felt to my t-shirt.
Which brings us to 2008. My girlfriend being a champion knitter and I being a champion nerd, we spied an opportunity to combine forces wonder-twins-like and make costumes involving knitting and computers. The thing is, that Venn diagram yields little overlap indeed. Eventually we settled on a Robot Prom theme — Carly would knit us vintage apparel and I would make it blink. And we even got started almost 3 months before Halloween. It just turns out that 3 months isn’t enough for Robot Prom.
Now, Carly pretty much knew what she was getting into. She chose challenging patterns and was working uphill against a law school schedule, but she’s knit entire dresses (and sculptures) before. Me, I’ve programmed plenty, but before August I had never built a single circuit, much less two wearables with multiple inputs and outputs communicating wirelessly. But that’s what I was going to do, I thought — our costumes were supposed to blink/pulse/whatever slowly and dimly when Carly and I were far apart, and then start spazzing out when we were close together. We realized that were were basically setting out to make costumes about how we’re an obnoxious, shmoopy couple (with LIGHTS!) but seriously, computers and knitting… there’s just not much you can do.
So Carly started knitting and I started reading and building simple circuits with my new Arduino Diecimila, but the going was pretty slow on my end. I was making all of the rookie mistakes that anyone new to physical computing makes, including burning out two XBee radios by connecting them to 5 volts (they’re spec’d for a maximum of 3.6) and breaking a multimeter by doing I’m-not-sure-what. Eventually, realizing that signal strength was not a reliable or fluid indicator of distance between radios, I ditched the S.O.-proximity-meter idea and just decided that our costumes would each have buttons and dials for controlling the light display on the other. Even so, it wasn’t till a week before Halloween that I had barebones prototypes working and communicating with each other, and those were on breadboards with good old reliable copper wires… I had to make them work on cotton fabric using conductive thread.
We didn’t actually start working on combining our work until the day of our first halloween party, the day before halloween. I took the day off with the intention of sewing like the wind. But it turns out I can’t even thread a needle, much less sew, much less sew like something fast or atmospheric. In a great stroke of luck, my wearable-electronics-ninja friend Grace stopped by for lunch that day, just as I was beginning to get a sense of how totally screwed I was. She provided such life-saving pointers as: how to keep traces of conductive thread from touching; if the thread touches your skin you will short your circuit; omg you’re totally screwed.
For the rest of the day, Carly and I sewed until our fingers shook and our eyes wouldn’t focus, but we only finished most of her circuit and almost none of mine before it was past time to go to the party. We knew we had to stop there, but we couldn’t even tell if hers worked at all, because it wasn’t designed to do anything without input from mine, so I quickly reprogrammed it to simplify its functionality (just one tri-color LED in her corsage, and no user control) and cut out the radio entirely. And by god, gutted as it was, it worked. The little light in Carly’s (beautiful, expertly knit) corsage pulsed different colors. She didn’t look like a robot, and I didn’t look like anything, but something worked. So we went to the party and looked like this:
Our sad unfinished costumes at the NYU Law Fall Ball (my sign says Ambitious Costume Fail)
Carly’s corsage went nyeer-nyeer-nyeer (video)
But that’s about it. The next day (Halloween), Carly spent all day sewing again, and I joined in as soon as I could, but by the time we had to leave, we were still missing pieces from the costumes, and the radios weren’t working (at one point I thought I actually destroyed my whole costume by connecting my Lilypad to 9v, but I got lucky). So again we had to cut back on functionality, but at least this time we both had blinky lights and buttons and knobs to control them. Also, we bought some silver face paint so that when people asked us what we were, we could say “Robot Prom!” without having to put “well, we were supposed to be…” in front of it. All told, it still didn’t make any damn sense but at least it looked like a Halloween costume:
Our much-improved costumes of Halloween proper
We lost a lot of sleep, I broke some electronics, we had to explain our costumes to everyone, and by the end of the process we weren’t having any fun at all. But on the other hand I got this sweet vest out of the deal and we didn’t break up. And isn’t that what really matters?
Some more pictures:
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The table covered in all our crap
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Furious sewing
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Testing Carly’s corsage
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