The Flower Antenna

One of the goals of the “Flower Antenna” project was to manufacture a 1:1-scaled prototype for an industrially-knitted receiving antenna and structure. The purpose of this was fourfold: 1) To understand how to make a multifunctional computational textile; 2) To test out preliminary algorithms to understand how to predict shape and close fit to a compression system; 3) To work with seamless knit industrial machines to develop a system that combined compressive system with knitted structure; 4) To design a working electronic system enabling the textile to capture electromagnetic waves and output them in some form, color, or sound. This work was developed from prior experiments and lessons learned while making the “Woven Light’ project which tried to integrate fiberoptics to stand in for Photovoltaics or PVs fibers.