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

Sewing

After learning more about soldering and the advantages of soldering our circuits, to allow for durability and reliability, we will look at another making skill: sewing. As mentioned earlier, conductive thread isn't great over long distances due to the resistance. However. we can sew conductive textiles that we have cut in shapes to suit our designs. This allows a larger current to be sent through the material, and we can use this for creativity in our circuits too!

We are going to learn more about sewing through practice. We’ll use our wearable technology project from the hyper-body system we started to prototype in the previous chapter. First, let’s take a look at recommended items for sewing.

Sample items used for sewing

There are a few essential items you need for sewing, and many other optional items too. See what items you already have, and then you can build up slowly all the sewing supplies:

Figure 10.29 – Sewing...