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 has explored the world of microcontrollers and how we can use them to bring more life to our wearables. We looked at what a microcontroller is and what its main features are. We then focused on the powerful ESP32 after learning about its predecessor, the 8266, which started a huge shift in wearables because of its inclusion of Wi-Fi capabilities at a much lower cost. Our board of choice was the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH ESP32 for several reasons, and it fit our project well. We looked at creating a wearable that would allow us to keep family and friends in our thoughts. This was a positive mental health and wellbeing project so we felt connected to loved ones who were at a distance.

To enable this technology and interaction, we looked at creating symbols that represented them and then accessing live data online. This was achieved through accessing an API service: in this example, it related to weather data. We then looked at making a non-traditional e-textile...