This was the first deliverable I was assigned when starting at BioThred; we required 8 sets of full-garment-knitted socks to complete a very early stage of family and friends testing. These socks were to be powered as evenly as possible with laser diodes housed in pods on the heels of the sock.

We worked with a partner in California, including traveling there for a few days, to get the socks knitted to our specifications with fiber inlaid at proper distances. Concurrently, I worked on developing a pod that would be able to fit inside a pocket in the sock and light all the fibers acceptably.

I worked with another engineer on our team to design an appropriate drive circuit and repurposed a charging and boosting board to fit into our pod. Unfortunately, once we completed the socks, we realized that the lasers would shut off after 10 minutes due to overheating. I was able to implement an extremely quick change while still using most of the same fabricated parts to incorporate a small fan onto a redesigned heat sink that cooled the lasers.

We were able to complete the samples in time and each ran acceptably for almost an hour (significantly longer than the 15 minutes we required).