Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2013: Wearables Hardware

Is your special giftee interested in DIY wearable tech? Here are the hottest bits of wearable hardware this year!


Available at Adafruit

flora-gps-starter-pack-adafruit

FLORA GPS Starter Pack – Get started with the fabulous Adafruit Flora platform with this lovely starter kit. Included are plenty of parts to make a few different fun projects! There’s a Flora motherboard, a GPS module that can also perform location datalogging, eight ultra-bright chainable RGB pixels, a battery holder and batteries, two types of our high quality stainless steel thread, alligator clips to help you test out your parts, a USB cable for reprogramming the Flora, and some parts to make a wearable remote control (or TV-B-Gone!): NPN transistors, long range IR LEDs, and matching resistors. Over $120 worth of goodies, for under $100.


flora-sensor-pack-adafruit

FLORA Sensor Pack – Sense the world around you! The FLORA Sensor Pack includes many types of sensors for your wearable enjoyment. Sense motion, direction, color, light levels, touch, and connections with FLORA sensor breakouts and conductive materials, and a few NeoPixels for experimenting with displaying your sensor information. Take your project portable with the included battery pack and stitch it into a final design with conductive thread. $100 worth of goodies for under $75. There’s no limit to the projects you can make with the included parts.


florabudgetpack

FLORA Budget Pack – Get started with the fabulous Adafruit Flora platform with this lovely budget kit, just enough to get you started with this fun wearable computer. Included are enough parts to make your first wearable electronic project. There’s a Flora motherboard, four ultra-bright chainable RGB pixels, a 3xAAA battery holder and batteries, a battery extension cable, our high quality stainless steel thread, alligator clips to help you test out your parts and connections and a USB cable for reprogramming the Flora. Over $55 worth of goodies, for under $45.


Adafruit GEMMA – Miniature wearable electronic platform – Love FLORA but want a bite-sized version? Look no further, GEMMA is a tiny wearable platform board with a lot of might in a 1″ diameter package. Powered by a Attiny85 and programmable with an Arduino IDE over USB, you’ll be able to realize any wearable project!

We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your Flora and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost sewable controller!

The Attiny85 is a fun processor because despite being so small, it has 8K of flash, and 5 I/O pins, including analog inputs and PWM ‘analog’ outputs. We designed a USB bootloader so you can plug it into any computer and reprogram it over a USB port just like an Arduino (it uses 2 of the 5 I/O pins, leaving you with 3). In fact we even made some simple modifications to the Arduino IDE so that it works like a mini-Flora. Perfect for small & simple projects the GEMMA will be your go-to wearable electronics platform.


becky'sfavoriteswitch

Tactile On/Off Switch with Leads – Squeeze once to turn on, squeeze again to turn off! This clicky switch makes a great power switch or mode toggler. We like this switch because it’s easy to embed in a seam for easily powering up/off wearable and fabric projects. Can handle up to 14V and 2 Amps! This is a really satisfying switch.


pulsesensor

Pulse Sensor Amped – Pulse Sensor Amped is a greatly improved version of the original Pulse Sensor, a plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino and Arduino compatibles. It can be used by students, artists, athletes, makers, and game & mobile developers who want to easily incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects.

Pulse Sensor Amped adds amplification and noise cancellation circuitry to the hardware. It’s noticeably faster and easier to get reliable pulse readings. Pulse Sensor Amped works with either a 3V and 5V Arduino.


ledartistrgb

The LED Artist A12 – RGB LED Wearable – Akimitsu “The LED Artist” Sadoi is a local New York artist who designs and makes beautiful LED art. We’re excited to carry his lovely new wearable designs. The A12 is a wearable ring, a little less than 2″ diameter, that has 12 RGB LEDs that animate and sparkle. Comes fully assembled and with a non-rechargeable CR2450 coin cell.


Available Elsewhere

SquareWear 2.0 is an open-source, Arduino-based wearable microcontroller board. It is small (1.7″x1.7″), low-cost, and provides an all-in-one solution for wearable electronics projects. At heart it’s an Arduino running at 3.3V and 12MHz. It has large pin holes to allow conductive thread to stitch through. You can also solder wires directly, or solder snaps for quick attachment and detachment from textile. SquareWear 2.0 is packed with useful components. It has an on-board mini-USB port, which is used for programming, for charging batteries, and for serial communication. No external programmer or USB serial cable is required. It has a color LED, a general-purpose push-button, a buzzer, a light sensor, a temperature sensor, and three MOSFETs to drive high-current load. In addition, it has a built-in rechargeable lithium coin battery, so you can power your projects right away without external power supply.


seeeduino-for-girls

Coming soon is this new board from Seeed, tentatively called the “female Seeeduino”:

Since Open Hardware has become increasingly popular, more people are joining this community. Of course, more women are also taking part in Open Hardware activities, which can be seen from Adafruit and LittleBits. We do hope to enlarge the open hardware community by attracting more lady makers to take part in:)

To make Open Hardware more accessible to people of different backgrounds, we’ve been trying to make Open Hardware more fun and aesthetic. We would love to show the awesomeness in the combination of arts and technology. Oh, right, this little cute thing doesn’t have a special name yet. Do you have any idea about giving it a suitable name? Welcome to leave your comments below or send emails to [email protected].


dresscode

DressCode is a collaboratively developed platform for wearables:

The design of the circuit has three important requirements: low power, low-cost, and to work for all volume levels from a quite radio at home to a loud sound system at a music festival. The circuit is deigned around a PIC24F microcontroller using PGAs to amplify the signal from the on-board microphone for sampling with the ADC. The three LED outputs are driven by FETs controlled by PWM signals and an FTDI header enables bootloading and serial communication for debugging. The board is powered from a small LiPo battery and has a on-board USB charger. The current firmware implements a envelope follower that partitions a proportionally controlled continuous gain between the hardware PGAs and software gain to maintain a full dynamic range at all volumes. Currently the three LED outputs react to the volume of the sound similar to a VU meter. The video below is a test of the PCB and firmware to show the LEDs responding to the music, battery charging via USB and the real-time display of the audio data streamed over serial using my serial oscilloscope.

Once the design was tested, I sent a circuit to Hannah and Mika in Berlin to test with the masquerade masks. The photo below shows the circuit attached to a yellow mask with copper thread sewn to the thee LED outputs and the video shows the complete mask flashing and pulsing in time with Mika’s music. More photos and documentation of the masquerade mask designs are available in Hannah’s and Mika’s flickr sets. The source files for the firmware and PCB are available on GitHub.


SHIPPING DEADLINES

Here are your 2013 shipping deadlines for ordering from Adafruit. Please review our shipping section if you have specific questions on how and where we ship worldwide for this holiday season.

UPS ground (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 13, 2013 – There is no guarantee that UPS Ground packages will arrive in time for Christmas.

UPS 3-day (USA orders): Place orders by Thursday 11am ET – December 19, 2013 – Arrive on 12/24/2013.

UPS 2-day (USA orders): Place orders by Friday 11am ET – December 20, 2013 – Arrive on 12/24/2013.

UPS overnight (USA orders): Place orders by Monday 11am ET – December 23, 2013 – Arrive on 12/24/2013.

UPS International: Place orders by Monday 11am ET – December 16, 2013. Can take up extra time due to worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2013 or sooner.

Please note: We do not offer Saturday service for UPS. Wednesday, Dec. 25, 2013, Christmas, no UPS pickup or delivery service. Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2014, New Year’s Day, no UPS pickup or delivery service.

United States Postal Service, First Class and Priority (USA orders): Place orders by Friday – December 13, 2013 – Arrive by 12/24/2013 or sooner.

USPS First class mail international (International orders): Place orders by Friday – November 22, 2013. Can take up to 30 days ore more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2013 or sooner, but not a trackable service cannot be guaranteed to arrive by 12/24/13.

USPS Express mail international(International orders): Place orders by Friday – December 13, 2013. Can take up to 15 days or more with worldwide delays and customs. Should arrive by 12/24/2013 or sooner.

Gift Certificates are always available at any time.

When in doubt contact us!


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