First of all I thought about the whole concept of my book. Of course, I made many changes during the work, but the main idea was the same.
2
Design
I wanted to put LEDs in the spine of the book, so it would be visible when book standing on the shelf. So at first, I thought about making one layer with conductive thread and LED on it. But later I saw that it does not look very nice because of the soldering. That is why I came up with idea of two layers of embroidery for the spine. First layer made from normal thread and has holes for the LED's. Second layer made with the conductive thread on which I solder SMD LED's.
At first I prepare design for cover layer and made it with enbroidery machine.
Then I made an embroidery with conductive soldarable thread on which I soldered SMD LED's.
3
Sensor
Next step was preparing a code for the sensor. I decided to work with capacitive sensor. For a sensor I used one a line of conductive thread.
4
Change of design
At this point I decided to make a design of my book in a different way. I came up with new name - See it, and changed design to a new one.
5
Binding of first prototype
After the spine with a new design was made I made a first try in binding. I combined two layers of fabric with cardboard I planned to use for the cover to see if the whole idea is going to work.
6
Debossing
During the process of binding I had an idea of using debossing instead of just printing the title for the cover of the book.On the next photos you can see my first tries with letter debossing.
Because the main element and symbol of the book is an eye I decided to make use it for the cover. For that I had to prepare a form for debossing. I decided to use 3 mm MDF and laser cutter. At first I thought that for debossing I need to use ingraving, but during the testing it becane obvious that just simple cutting is going to work well.
7
Look for the best combination for the embroidery
As my design changed I improved the design of the spine. Then I was testing different color combinations for the fabric and thread. The contast between the fabric and the thread should not be very high, because in that case the LED would not have pop-out effect and would not be very visible.
8
Second prototype
I decided to made double-sided book (french door binding) because it would allow me to hide all electronic part in a nice and accesible way. At this point I tried to make the cover, but of course there was several mistakes such as using the same size of the cardboard for the inner covers (it should be smaller for at least few millimiters otherwise they will bent the spine).
8
Book content
This step was completely dedicated to the designing book content. All illustrations support the idea of the book and based on Gestalt principles and visual perception. Design of book was made by me. The bool consists of the two parts: black & white and color. The idea is to show how the color can change our perception. For the binding I used section sewn binding.
9
Changes in the spine design
During the binding process I saw that fabric does not stick properly to another layer of fabric. That is why I switch to another approach - I made the second layer of the spine directly on the cardboard with copper tape.
10
Left side of the book
I wanted to hide all electronics in a nice looking way, but still keep the access to it in case something will need to be changed or improved. That is why I used two layers of the foamboard which is hign enough to hide ATtiny. To look in nice I used printed pattern from the book design. Also to keep it close I put small magnet lock which can be easily open if needed.
11
Second sensor
During the process I had and idea of using the second sensor whic can be activated when book is open. I designed it in a way of blincking eyes. For the sensor I combined code of capasirive sensor and blinking LED's. For design used laser cutted elements.
The difficult was a part of soldering SMD LED's because they had to match with the holes in the cover. For that I had to change the position of LED's for 2 times.
12
Preparing the circuits
Last part was dedicated to putting all components together. For the circuit I used copper tape and cardboard. The very important and wise idea was to use adaptors for the ATtiny, because I had to change code for several times and using adaptors made it possible.
