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

Taking a closer look at the ESP32

The ESP32 is a single 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth system on a chip (SoC) and a general-purpose microcontroller, designed by Espressif Systems. You can find more information online about their processors at https://www.espressif.com/.

Figure 7.2 – Varieties of ESP32 dev boards

This chip has been added to different boards (Figure 7.2) and it is these development boards that we’ll be using. The prices for these boards vary. Consider what the features are for the different boards and the cost trade-offs. ESP32 offers capacitive touch, I2C, SPI, PWM, and much more.

A guide accessed online at https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp32-pinout-reference/ contains the common pinouts (GPIOs) for the ESP32-based boards.

Important to Note

Although these are the common standard pin layouts, I would highly advise you to always check your specific board for the GPIOs. Some boards have 30 pins, others 36. You don’t...