Cozy Clothes is designed to heat your clothes when it’s cold out. In the beginning, there was a mutual feeling throughout the team that is was hard to get out of bed in the morning. On cold winter mornings before school, the temptation stay in a warm bed is overpowering. We decided that the best way to fix this is to think of a way to make being out of bed more comfortable. During a brainstorm, we came up with the idea to heat up your clothing, so that when you wake up, you have a warm outfit waiting for you. We found that when you put on your clothes, they don’t heat you up very fast which leaves you cold till you start moving around. The final design was inspired by putting warm clothes on that had just come out of the drier. If you have ever put on clothes fresh out of the drier, you will know that it is one of the most comfortable things you can do. Why not create that same feeling for when you get out of bed?

We started out with a little heating pad that we put into a tissue box, and we saw that one heating pad in a tissue box would get to about 160℉. Once we saw that it worked we began to think about using bluetooth. Instead of using an Arduino we could use a Bluefruit control unit, which connects to an app on your smartphone using bluetooth. The Bluefruit controlled a switch that would turn on the heating pad but, we ran into the problem of there not being enough pins to connect LED lights to. We settled on using an Arduino. We wanted to test the heating pads in a bigger box so we got a box that was about the size of sandwich tub and insulated it with cloth. After we saw success in the 2nd prototype we went on to start to designing a better box that could hold clothes and would look better than just an old box. We figured out very quick that we should have buttons and lights on the project so, we got to programing an Arduino to control 3x temp lights and 6x LEDs to indicate how much time is left in heating your clothes.

The next steps in this project would be to add the ability to use bluetooth. You could turn on Cozy Clothes with the touch of button on an app on your smartphone. That way, you could, from a distance, set it to turn on . To take this one step further, we would install a real-time clock into it so that you can set Cozy Clothes to start heating up at a certain time every day. Also, we would fix the programming so when the 10 minute button is pushed, then the 30 minute button is pushed, the heating pads would stay on and not turn off. We wanted to add a way to connect solar panels, so it would be more eco friendly. We originally found that the heating pads do not consume very much energy. Each one uses just .6 Amps. Thus, it is very conceivable that the entire device could be powered solely off of solar panels, that goes to a battery to pump out the 1.2 Amps needed to power the whole system, although we would also make it able to plug into a wall. One of the biggest changes we want to add is to be able to cool clothes (using a thermoelectric Peltier module) and not just heat. This would make Cozy Clothes a year-round product because it would be useful on warm, summer days.

Early on in our process, we interviewed other students to get their opinions on our idea. One issue that was raised a couple of times was that Cozy Clothes functions a lot like a towel warmer. In a towel warmer, the towel comes into contact with metal bars, which heat up. This is actually very different from Cozy Clothes. A towel warmer only heats up specific parts of the towel; the parts in contact with the bars. In Cozy Clothes, the entire box is designed to heat up, enabling even heat distribution. Also, towel warmers use a lot more power than Cozy Clothes because Cozy Clothes is insulated, allowing it to save power. Also, during this interview process, we first thought about portability. A student mentioned that it would be great if you could bring Cozy Clothes in your car when you go skiing, for example.