"...the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another."
This is a very simple FLORA project with no soldering– a single NeoPixel lights up on an embroidered angler fish on a pair of shorts. The main board is stitched on the front of the design, in the belly of the fish. A snap is used on the fin as a digital switch, triggering a color change in the pixel in the angler’s lure. Follow the circuit diagram to stitch up this circuit, and tuck the battery in the pocket.
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!
Clyde’s a bright lamp and an expressive, tricolor ambient light. Sensor modules and Arduino compatibility make him easy to customize. Learn more at fabule.com
We’ve all wanted it. Now you can build it.
Instant dance parties.
Personal theme music.
Motion activated music.
Booty Box.
Uses an Adafruit Wave Shield! Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.
For a couple of weeks now, maker “bob500000″ has been developing and tuning a project with the help of the Adafruit Technical Support engineers over at the Adafruit Forums — and now the project appears to be up and running, with a posted image called “Complete!” Check out the long journey and what we can all learn about how to tackle these sort of challenges. (Thanks, Mike, Rick and Bill for the detailed responses to help all of us, your colleagues included!)
Here’s where it all started back in mid April:
Is it possible to link 4 shift registers via one arduino board, I am either looking at using just 4 pins on the board, I have all the code that I want to run, just the linking of the shift registers.
This is an Arduino porting of the excellent work by Markus Frejek. The final aim is to create an economic component tester using Arduino and a few passive components;
An intuitive, adaptive, and delightful touchscreen alarm clock.
Easy to see with uncorrected vision, and easy to set with confidence, even when tired.
An open hardware work-in-progress.
Powered by Arduino, curiosity, and ignorance.
This is a journal of the design and prototyping process, starting with a February 2012 rant about what I dislike about every alarm clock I’ve met. I didn’t know much about electronics, but that hasn’t stopped me yet!
My discoveries are recorded here, for the benefit of present and future Citizens of the Makerverse.
NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Esplora – The Arduino Esplora is a fun new game controller-shaped microcontroller board derived from the popular Arduino Leonardo. What makes the Esplora cool (and a great starter board) is that it has a number of built-in, ready-to-use sensors already on the board, for easy interaction. It’s designed for people who want to get up and running with Arduino without having to learn about the electronics wiring first. For a step-by-step introduction to the Esplora, check out the Getting Started with Esplora guide.
The Esplora has onboard sound and light outputs, and several input sensors, including a joystick, a slider, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a light sensor. It also has the potential to expand its capabilities with two Tinkerkit input and output connectors, and a socket for a color TFT LCD screen (coming soon!).
Like the Leonardo board, the Esplora uses an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection capable of acting as a USB client device. Since the Esplora has built-in USB communication; it can appear to a connected computer as a mouse or keyboard, in addition to a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. Great for making interactive projects super fast! It even comes with a 5 foot long Micro USB cable so you can plug in and go.
Ever think your coat could guide you home? The easiest way to add location information to your wearable electronics project is with the Flora GPS. It’s part of the Adafruit Flora series of wearable electronics, designed specifically for use with the Flora main board. Installed on the PCB is the latest of our Ultimate GPS modules, a small, super-thin, low power GPS module with built in data-logging capability! This module’s easy to use, but extremely powerful. Check out our video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.
-165 dBm sensitivity, 10 Hz updates, 66 channels
Designed for wearable use with the Flora system
Only 20mA current draw
RTC battery-compatible – sew a battery on to create a atomic-precision real time clock
Built-in datalogging
>25Km altitude
Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
The breakout is built around the MTK3339 chipset, a no-nonsense, high-quality GPS module that can track up to 22 satellites on 66 channels, has an excellent high-sensitivity receiver (-165 dB tracking!), and a built in antenna. It can do up to 10 location updates a second for high speed, high sensitivity logging or tracking. Power usage is incredibly low, only 20 mA during navigation.
The module is kept small and simple, we have a ferrite bead, filter capacitor and red fix LED on board. The LED blinks at about 1Hz while it’s searching for satellites and blinks once every 15 seconds when a fix is found to conserve power. If you want to have an LED on all the time, we also provide the FIX signal out on a pin so you can put an external LED on.
Two features that really stand out about the MTK3339-based module is the external antenna functionality and the the built in data-logging capability. The module has a standard ceramic patch antenna that gives it -165 dB sensitivity, but when you want to have a bigger antenna, you can snap on any 3V active GPS antenna via the uFL connector. The module will automatically detect the active antenna and switch over! Most GPS antennas use SMA connectors so you may want to pick up one of our uFL to SMA adapters.
The other cool feature of the new MTK3339-based module (which we have tested with great success) is the built in datalogging ability. Since there is a microcontroller inside the module, with some empty FLASH memory, the newest firmware now allows sending commands to do internal logging to that FLASH. The only thing is that you do need to have the Flora mainboard send the “Start Logging” command. However, after that message is sent, the Flora can go to sleep and does not need to wake up to talk to the GPS anymore to reduce power consumption. The time, date, longitude, latitude, and height is logged every 15 seconds and only when there is a fix. The internal FLASH can store about 16 hours of data, it will automatically append data so you don’t have to worry about accidentally losing data if power is lost. It is not possible to change what is logged and how often, as its hardcoded into the module but we found that this arrangement covers many of the most common GPS datalogging requirements.
Comes with one fully assembled and tested module. If you’d like to back up the RTC for faster fix-recovery, pick up a sewable CR2032 holder & CR2032 battery and sew it so the + side connects to the VBAT pad and the – side connects to ground.
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!
For the compass rose, I stitched the Adafruit neopixels together and hooked them up to the Adafruit Flora. Also connected to the Flora is a magnetometer/accelerometer. The magnetometer probably gave me the most grief. It turns out that if you want to use communications protocols (like I2C) on e-textiles, make sure the connection is SOLID! I became so frustrated with the magnetometer not talking to the Flora that I just soldered some wires instead.
Despite the frustrations, I’m pretty happy with how the bag turned out. This was also the first time using the Flora and I have to say, I love it! I can certainly tell that the folks at Adafruit put A LOT of thought into it. One little detail that made me really happy was strategically placing the SDA, SCL, power and ground pads so that you wouldn’t have to have any thread/wires cross. If you’ve been working with e-textiles for a while, you’ll know exactly what I mean! Seriously, Adafruit…thank you!!!
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 rePaper development boards from Pervasive Displays come with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there’s also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.
The display is 2″ diagonal and 200 x 96 resolution true eInk graphical display. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, its also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages
RePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo and Mega, as well as a driver compatible with the Adafruit GFX Library. Now you can program this display with the same library as all our TFT LCD and LED matrix displays!
“Let rise at room temperature” is a common instruction in bread recipes, with “room temperature” being about 70 F (21.1 C)*. For various reasons, however, this temperature can be hard to find in my apartment in Berkeley, California, and so my bread doughs sometimes rise far too slowly.
One day, I realized that my Arduino Uno microcontroller could help solve this problem. I had earlier configured it to measure milk temperature during yogurt making, and realized that would be a short leap to use it to control the air temperature inside a container, thereby creating a stable and warm location for dough fermentation and proofing (a “proofing box”). My idea was simple: an incandescent light bulb in a clip-on lamp as the heat source, a temperature sensor, a switch that turns the light bulb on and off, and the Arduino to control the switch. Basically, as one person who heard my plan put it, “It’s an Easy-Bake Oven!”
But how would I switch the light bulb on and off using the low voltage, low current digital outputs on the Arduino? A relay could be wired in and the lamp could be hacked, but that would be bothersome and potentially dangerous. Then I learned about the Powerswitch Tail II. This easy-to-use device allows your Arduino or other controller to switch on and off an A/C powered device, like a lamp, coffee maker, hot plate, and so on. By connecting a digital output line and ground from the Arduino to the + and – inputs of the Powerswitch Tail, the connected device can be switched on and off. No cutting, soldering or taping required, just connect and go…..
Powerswitch tail 2: The Power Switch Tail II is a smart alternative to slicing apart power cords to wire up your own relays. Its a compact 120V 3-pronged extension cord, with a relay board embedded in the middle. Connect to the relay using two screw terminals and activate by providing a 3 to 12V signal (3mA current draw at 3V, 30mA at 12V). The relay can switch 15 Amp resistive loads such as heaters, small skillets, lights, etc. An LED indicator above the terminals will help you with debugging. (read more)
The PANdora Box can send one of 16 messages selected by the brass knob connected to a rotary encoder in the center of the base section. The smoky plex allows the various parts within to be seen, aided by an LED strip light of variable color and intensity, and mirrors on the interior walls. Wacky button sounds are played by the Wav shield as the user rotates the brass knob through each message. Pressing the brass knob instructs an Arduino to send the selected Wav file name across the PAN to the remote listeners which then find and play the Wav file, with, or sometimes without, a preamble. The preamble can be selected from a list appropriate to the message, such as creaky doors, or impersonations. The message itself is usually something useful (but not always) like Kids, please take out the garbage.
The Pareto Principle — also known as the 80/20 Rule — is the idea (originally from economics, but now applied in many ways) that 80% of results stem from 20% of the effort.
Devoted film fans will spend countless hours and hundreds of dollars (occasionally even thousands) to create flawless replica props for their personal collections. The iconic eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: a Space Odyssey is one such object of desire…popular enough that detailed (and pricey) licensed reproductions exist. This is cool stuff! But if we relax our criteria just a bit, you or I can turn out a pretty decent, recognizable facsimile in a weekend for just a small fraction of the cost. The 80/20 rule in action!
We’re not selling a prop or even a kit here…that would raise a big licensing stink, so please don’t ask. What follows are some ideas on creating one yourself. Much like our not-a-Back-to-the-Future-clock project, the concept came about when customers noted that a component already in our shop resembled an unrelated film item — in this case, our Massive Red Arcade Button and HAL’s distinctive lens.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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!
FEED
