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

Summary

This chapter explored the e-textile boards and kits that we can use to get up and running with our wearable circuits. We explored their differences and uses and how you can make decisions about which board will be a perfect fit for your projects. The Gemma M0 board is a great little board to start a project with due to its size and affordability, and the Flora gives us a few more options to add more interactivity to our wearables.

The Circuit Playground range of boards offers huge interaction possibilities in our projects due to their huge feature sets. At the time of writing, there isn’t a more comprehensive board on the market. We also learned about the LilyPad range of components, which allows us to add sewable sensors easily. The pre-programmed boards allow us to create fun circuits that only require sewing. Then, we learned about the LilyPad boards with I/O pins, which can be useful for expanding the projects we create.

We finished by installing the Arduino...