Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology

By : Christine Farion
Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology

By: Christine Farion

Overview of this book

Wearable circuits add interaction and purpose to clothing and other wearable devices that are currently widely used in medical, social, safety, entertainment, and sports fields. To develop useful and impressive prototypes and wearables, you’ll need to be skilled in designing electronic circuits and working with wearable technologies. This book takes you on an interesting journey through wearable technology, starting from electronic circuits, materials, and e-textile toolkits to using Arduino, which includes a variety of sensors, outputs, actuators, and microcontrollers such as Gemma M0 and ESP32. As you progress, you’ll be carefully guided through creating an advanced IoT project. You’ll learn by doing and create wearables with the help of practical examples and exercises. Later chapters will show you how to develop a hyper-body wearable and solder and sew circuits. Finally, you’ll discover how to build a culture-driven wearable to track data and provide feedback using a Design Innovation approach. After reading this book, you’ll be able to design interactive prototypes and sew, solder, and program your own Arduino-based wearable devices with a purpose.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Wearable Technology and Simple Circuits
6
Part 2:Creating Sewable Circuits That Sense and React Using Arduino and ESP32
10
Part 3:Learning to Prototype, Build, and Wear a Hyper-Body System
14
Part 4:Getting the Taste of Designing Your Own Culture-Driven Wearable and Beyond

Connecting the QT Py to the internet

We’ve chosen to use the Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 board for a few reasons, such as its small form factor, the huge number of accessible pins, the ability to expand our circuits easily and quickly with STEMMA QT connections, but also because it is an internet-capable board. A STEMMA connection is a three- or four-pin JST PH connector that manufacturers have been putting on boards over the last few years to make connecting components quicker. The four-pin version is for I2C use.

We will create a way for our friends and families to send colorful feelings to us, or if we give the wearable to a loved one, for us to send colors to them. This will be done using an IoT service. To do this, we will have to follow a few steps to create and use an online service, https://io.adafruit.com/, to make a connection. There are other services available – however, this service has a lot of support and users, so it is a good place to start. Let’...