Book Image

Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero

By : Jon Witts
Book Image

Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero

By: Jon Witts

Overview of this book

With Wearable-Tech Projects with the Raspberry Pi Zero, you will begin with learning how to install the required software for your upcoming projects. You will also learn how to control electronic devices with the GPIOZero Python library. Next, you will be creating some stylish wearable-tech projects such as a motion-reactive LED cap and a Tweet-activated LED T-shirt. Toward the end of the book, you will be creating some useful health and fitness wearable-tech projects; these will help you monitor your heart rate, track your movements with GPS, and count your footsteps with your own pedometer. By the end of the book, you will have created a range of wearable-tech projects and learned enough about your Raspberry Pi Zero that you should be able to adapt these projects further or come up with your own creations!
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Creating our electrical circuit

Before we go any further with this project, we need to talk a little bit about power for our DotStar LED strip. DotStar LEDs have a very specific power requirement; if there is not enough power, you will not be able to see them clearly; and if there's too much power, you risk damaging your LEDs. To complicate matters further, we need our power source to be portable in this project, so we will need to make use of batteries of one kind or another. Due to the exacting power requirements of the DotStar LEDs, we will also need to use some electronics to allow our Pi Zero to control DotStar LEDs.

DotStar LEDs are rated as 5V devices. Including a +- 10% tolerance gives us a safe working voltage range of 4.5V to 5.5V to power our DotStar LEDs. Now, you may ask why we don't just use the 5V line from the Pi Zero to power the LED strip? The reason...