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

The Arduino IDE

We’ve used the Arduino IDE for a couple of projects, so the interface should be familiar to you. In this section, I want to cover a few basics of programming and the interface.

This section is for beginners so that they feel more comfortable with using Arduino. If you are a seasoned programmer, you may want to jump ahead to hooking up the Gemma M0 board.

Let’s take a brief tour of a few of the terms and what they are:

  • Functions
  • Variables
  • Other tips/syntax

We’ll start by looking at functions, which we covered briefly earlier in this book.

Functions

Functions are important for segmenting code into modular pieces. These perform a defined task and then return to where that code was called from. It’s useful if there are a series of steps that we want to repeat. An example is the digitalWrite() function, which we can use to write a HIGH or LOW value to a digital pin. We can write our own functions, but digitalWrite...