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

Comparisons and observations

These comparisons and observations are largely from my experiences with using different systems across a variety of projects. It also comes from reading a lot of research projects and developmental workshop information, to learn about other people’s perspectives and uses for these boards.

The LilyPad boards are usually purple and have a petal-style design. The Flora has larger sew tabs so that you can easily use your crocodile clips on them. In addition, the board is black, which I like for my circuits. The Gemma M0 is also black, and the size makes it a great fit for hiding in clothing easily.

You may want to consider choosing a board that has a lot of support and resource materials. Some boards have extensive libraries, for example, and great documentation. Also, I have found some boards difficult to source. From researching these boards, it looks like the LilyPad Arduino USB Plus will be the LilyPad board to support. Some of their other...