Open Universal Input Sleeve {OUIS}
Love fabric? Love tech? The Open Universal Input Sleeve is a stylish and functional way to add touch input to your electronics projects! Using conductive fabric, this sleeve allows you to create wearable touch controls for music, gaming, assistive tech, or smart home applications. Whether you’re using an ESP32 or Arduino, this project brings gesture-based interaction to your creations.
The kit includes conductive fabric strips, neoprene fabric, wiring, and optional circuit boards, giving you everything you need to get started. Perfect for e-textiles, wearables, and DIY electronics, this sleeve is infinitely customizable—add more inputs, Bluetooth connectivity, or unique patterns to make it your own!
Sew it, customize it, and share your creation!
$22.99 – $54.95
Product Info
I love fabric! I really love conductive fabric, so if you’ve never used conductive fabric, I hope you sew and enjoy this Instructable.
Conductive fabric is fabric that conducts electricity. Typically, there are metal strands woven into the fabric, or the metal strands might be woven with other fabrics, such as polyester. Making e-textiles, wearables, and soft circuits often uses conductive fabrics for a variety of projects.
What are we making?
In this kit, we are creating an Open Universal Input Sleeve. This adds touch input capabilities quickly and stylishly to your projects!
Why do you need the sleeve?
Using this sleeve, in any configuration can provide inputs for your electronic projects. You can connect it to any circuit board and – use it for touch input (native on an ESP32 board, for example), adding touch capabilities to any project. If your microprocessor board doesn’t have native touch capability, you can use a touch library (ADCTouch, I’ll provide a code example at the end of this guide) to add this to an Arduino-based board.
Once you’ve followed along to create a basic sleeve, you can modify this in infinite ways! Share your creation – what fabrics will you use? How many touch inputs? What shapes and styles will you add?
Project featured on Adafruit for wearable Wednesdays.
What is included in this kit:
- Choice of:
- No Circuit board – use your own
- Circuit Playground Classic board (pre programmed optional), (Circuit playground shown in image)
- ESP 32 Basic board
- 8 strips of conductive fabrics, mixed samples
- crocodile/aligator clips for your circuit – (you will need to solder to the ESP32 board)
- Neoprene fabric to use for creating the sleeve (grey, deep red, dark grey, black random selected)
- Silicone wires, enough for 8 lengths to connect to the board if you prefer after testing with the clips
You will need Sewing materials (needle, thread, scissors)
There is a pdf file for you to check how to cut the sleeve part from the neoprene. And the tutorial is on Instructables to create this sleeve.
You will need basic sewing knowledge to complete this project.
The Open Universal Input Sleeve is just the start – once you’ve built the basic version, you can modify it infinitely with:
✅ Different fabric textures & colors
✅ More touch zones & patterns
✅ Wireless Bluetooth integration
✅ Gesture recognition for complex controls
What will you use your sleeve for? 🚀💡
Additional information
| Microcontroller | None, Circuit Playground, ESP32, Circuit Playground Programmed |
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