Rapanui, a leading eco clothing manufacturer from the Isle of Wight, allows its customers to control the fashion brand’s clothing factory, by designing and making items of clothing through a twitter-powered Raspberry Pi.

The manufacturer has connected a Raspberry Pi (credit card sized computers used in the teaching of basic computer science in school) to the real life factory, allowing anyone to take control of the t-shirt making process via twitter page @tshirtplease.

T-shirt please

Rapanui has developed the page to mark the internationally celebrated Pi Day (#piday) that takes place on 14 March. Due to the date’s similarities with the famous mathematical constant (3/14 in the month/day date format), the 14 March has also become popular for Raspberry Pi related educational events, projects and hackathons.

The @tshirtplease project allows anyone in the world to create a t-shirt at the Rapanui factory by tweeting an image to @tshirtplease.

The Raspberry Pi mini-computer was coded using NodeRed, an IBM software product that was developed to power the Internet of Things. It will tweet the user back a buyable t-shirt that they can save, share with their friends or buy to wear themselves.

Inspiration

An IBM employee said this was the first recorded use of NodeRed being used to power a life internet-of-things production system.

“We recently developed an API for our factory that allows mobile and web developers to connect their applications to our factory. It’s been inspiring to see how the inspiration of #piday can help accelerate learning and product development,” commented Mart Drake-Knight, co-founder and CTO.

www.rapanuiclothing.com