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

Using libraries

We can connect sensors to our Arduino-based microcontroller boards using the I2C and SPI protocols. We can also make use of the sensors and components quicker and easier using a library. Let’s take a closer look at these areas now. We’ll start with libraries.

How do we use a library?

You will use the Library Manager a lot when you’re making your wearables. Libraries provide your sketches with extra functionality. What are libraries? The Arduino website says, “Libraries are a collection of code that makes it easy for you to connect to a sensor, display, module, etc. There are hundreds of additional libraries available on the Internet for download.”

They can be written by anyone, and you can create your own and share it. When I last checked, there were over 4,000 libraries! Libraries are used in many of the sketches we write in the Arduino IDE. We can easily install them and, typically, they include sample code to help us get...