Next we cut out a little circle of conductive fabric and split it in two and sewed them onto the left shoulder blade. We took conductive thread, sewed it into the VBATT hole, and connected it to one of the conductive fabric circle halves. We then sewed a new piece of conductive thread from the unused half circle, and connected it through all of the positive ends of the LED lights.
By interrupting the circuit using the conductive fabric half circles, when someone wearing conductive thread on their right wrist, the circuit will complete when they put their arm around the person wearing the sweater.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Ever wish your clothes could change color to match each other? Make a chameleon scarf to match every outfit using the Flora color sensor and 12 color-changing LED pixels diffused by a ruffly knit scarf. Check out the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo, and make your own with the full tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System.
Flora Color Sensor – TCS34725 – Your electronics can now see in dazzling color with this lovely color light sensor. We found the best color sensor on the market, the TCS34725, which has RGB and Clear light sensing elements. An IR blocking filter, integrated on-chip and localized to the color sensing photodiodes, minimizes the IR spectral component of the incoming light and allows color measurements to be made accurately. The filter means you’ll get much truer color than most sensors, since humans don’t see IR. The sensor also has an incredible 3,800,000:1 dynamic range with adjustable integration time and gain so it is suited for use behind darkened glass or fabric.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
The rig is composed of a Teensy++ 2.0, eighteen red LEDs, eighteen resistors, and a few bits of laser-cut plastic. LEDs are used to both illuminate the paper and sense the holes. The sensor design is based on the classic Arduino LED sensing code. It’s not very reliable, but it’s a fun afternoon proof-of-concept.
The Mood Lamp project by Vittorio Cuculo, is a system using interactions to communicate an emotional state to a physical object and receive back a coherent response. In particular, through your facial expression you communicate your emotional state to an RGB color lamp . The lamp, at this point, will respond to the interaction by changing the color of the light emitted in accordance with the emotional state inferred.
The aim of the systems is to remove the mediation between human and machine typical of classic interfaces. Among the modes of natural interaction we usually have gestures, gaze tracking and facial expressions. The latter are particularly relevant because they play a fundamental role in nonverbal communication between human beings.
Kitesurfing is one of the most addictive sports in the world. All it requires is a kiteboard, a body of water, and a few accessories. It’s a great way to get in touch with nature, free up your mind, and exercise. Plus, you can really go crazy with it.
So what’s the problem?
Oh, I forgot one essential requirement: wind. And that’s where we have our problem: you never know whether or not there will be wind unless you live right by your favorite kitesurfing spot.
I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. That’s roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can’t deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving.
I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.
I loved his simple, elegant fishing line PlotterBot — that made expressive illustrations of the Tardis from Doctor Who, Nikola Tesla, and other images — and also loved that his daughter, TinkerGirl, had her own booth display of Spinning Robot Drawings at the table next to him.
While it might be true that I’m obsessed with pen plotters and drawbots of all kinds so they had me from the get-go, spending time chatting with the two of them back and forth about their passion for creating robots to create art with them — and watching the excitement TinkerGirl communicated to visitors to her part of the display — touched my heart and was one of my favorite authentic maker experiences at the Faire this year.
A PlotterBot or DrawBot is a robot that can draw really large mural sized images. It is easy and cheap to build using very common parts and tools. (Read more about PlotterBot.)
The LighTouch (http://wolfebaine.blogspot.com/2013/03/lightouch.html) is a ‘touchless’ music player based on Arduino that is controlled by ultrasonic sensor. The distance of your hand determines pause/play, volume control, or next track.
LighTouch was an idea I had as I was just diving into Arduino. Like anyone getting started, I bought an Uno and three random shields just to play with (music shield, bluetooth, and ultrasonic range finder). To that end, I got each of them up and running in record time and got bored. So what was the next logical step? Right… figure out how many of these shields can I use at the same time. In this case, a music shield and ultrasonic range finder made the cut.
The idea is pretty simple; an mp3 player that you never have to touch. Simply hold your hand over the device to adjust volume, pause, and move to the next track. All the commands basically key on the distance of your hand from the sensor.
Massimo Banzi announced it some minutes ago during his annual “The state of Arduino” presentation at Maker Faire Bay Area: Arduino Yún is the first of a revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux.
Yún means “cloud” in chinese language, as the purpose of this board to make it simple to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.
We’re happy to announce the release of a new version of the Arduino software, version 1.0.5. Barring any unexpected bugfixes, this is the final planned release of the 1.0 series of the IDE. Future releases will be from the 1.5 branch that has been in beta since last summer.
With that excitement out of the way, let’s get to the new features :
New library import functionality to install libraries directly from a .zip file in the IDE. You can see more information about this on the installing 3rd party libraries page.
A Windows installer, which will hopefully streamline the process of setting up the IDE and drivers.
Windows signed drivers. This means Windows 8 will no longer prevent you from installing Arduino drivers.
The application is signed for OSX 10.8 (this was part of 1.0.4, but we thought it was so nice it deserved another mention).
Various bugfixes and optimizations, look at the release notes for a complete description.
Special thanks to everyone who contributed on this release. You rock.
Future releases of the IDE will support multiple architectures (like the ARM used in the Due). There is also a new library and 3rd party board implementation being introduced. You can read more about these on the 1.5 library specification and 3rd party hardware support pages
Arduino is ready for Maker Faire Bay Area, the world’s most diverse showcase of creativity and innovation in technology, craft and science.
On 18th and 19th May 2013 at San Mateo County Events Center, in California, Arduino will present a lot of novelties, proving more and more to be one of the benchmark in the maker movement.
A new product – Arduino Robot brings you into the world of robotics. Designed with Complubot, the 4-times world champions in Robocup Junior robotics soccer, the robot allows for endless hours of experimentation and play. It is a self-contained platform allowing you to build interactive machines to explore the world. You can use it as it is, modify its software and even add your own hardware on top of it. You can learn as you go: the Arduino Robot is perfect for the novice but also for those looking for their next challenge.
As always with Arduino, every element of the platform – hardware, software and documentation – is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it’s made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots.
A new software – Arduino has released the new version of the Arduino IDE and the new TFT screen. TCT LCD library relies on the Adafruit GFX and ST7735 libraries. Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer Limor ‘Ladyada’, Enterpreneur of the year 2012. The Arduino specific library, named TFT, extends the Adafruit libraries to support more Processing-like methods. You can write text, draw shapes, and show bitmap images on the screen in a way that should be familiar to users of Processing.
Deirdre’s new Lioness/Cat costume using Adafruit FLORA electronics to light it up! We’re still in testing, the whiskers and eyes will be aligned and have additional electronics to make the eyes and ears move, and the whiskers twitch. Only so many hours after work to put into it, hoping we’re 100% done for the next Show & Tell!
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Ask any maker what the hottest subjects are in DIY electronics these days, and odds are the first answer will be Arduino. Since the earliest boards were built in 2005 to enable students to run interactive design projects with open-source tools, the platform has become a world-wide phenomenon, igniting the imaginations of makers, hackers, and artists all over. Simply speaking, Arduino is huge in the maker and MAKE communities.
The Existential Emergency Phone is a multipurpose tool for handling all of life’s uncertainties. It can be used for both dialing out and calling in. The way that it works is that when you pick up the handset, the telephone makes a call using a custom cellular module to a list of predefined phone numbers. Whether the phone calls a list of people you know, a list of people you don’t know, or randomly dials strangers in your area code, is really up to you. Alternately, the number can be distributed to people with existential emergencies and they can dial in for others to answer. The many manners in which the phone can be used makes it well suited for processing existential emergencies both outgoing and incoming.