More on E-textiles: Electronic Smart Fabric

Little Hamster writes "The IEEE spectrum has an article on e-textile, where conductive fibers woven into fabric using standard textile techniques carry power to sensors, actuators and microcontrollers embedded in the cloth. The result is snowmobilers jacket that can detect crashes and txt an SMS message for help, carpet that can detect motion, or a T-shirt that shows videos. Oh, and the smart fabric is washable too."

Flying Cars

[Bugmaster]

The article is very heavy on breathless anticipation, and very light on details. It reminds me of all the "flying cars" types of articles from the 50s. Oh, how wonderful will it be when each household can have a flying car ! No more traffic congestion ! And the cars will fly themselves, too -- just push a button ! Golly gee ! Etc. etc.

Yes, I agree, I would love to put on my e-textile t-shirt, hop into my flying car, and fly it to my vacation villa on the Moon. But, as far as I can tell, these technologies are a long, long way off from actual implementation. Our current limits right now are power storage (all that Bluetooth needs to be fed), durability and size (small chips are fine, but we are talking hundreds of pretty powerful computers), architecture (implementing that automatic handoff on failure is hard), cost (buy an e-shirt now ! Only $9999.99 !"), and dozens of other things. Until we can overcome these problems, I am not holding my breath.