I made a watch. Because of course I did. Same wrist-strap and general idea as the LilyPad and Protoboard Wrist Controller. But the protoboard is populated with a Real Time Clock (RTC) module, and four-digit seven-segment display.

I'm using the SparkFun DeadOn RTC module. I got it for another project and just happened to have it laying around. You can get others that use fewer pins though, like I used in the clock. (DeadOn RTC setup guide). Downsides include not being able to find the right sized battery. (I had to go to Belgium for it, and it still hasn't arrived.) Upsides include the module having two alarms. One to the second, the other to the minute.

If I have alarms I'm going to need an alert, so throw in a LilyPad Buzzer (as in speaker) (Buzzer setup guide), and a SPDT slide switch to put it into silent mode. And if it's on silent I'm going to want a vibrate option, so add a LilyPad Vibe Board. This is the Vibe Board setup guide, but I'm doing things a bit differently. I'm not using a MOSFET, and I connected - to GND, and + to PWM pin 6. It works just fine.

To see the time I'll need a nice display like Adafruit 4-Digit 7-Segment Display with I2C Backpack (Display Backpack library setup), and a nice Metal Ball Tactile Button to turn it on and off.

Then I just have to figure out how to connect everything together, and program it.

Details )

Then just turn everything on! There is quite a lot you can do with this kind of completely hackable setup. As it is you can use the alerts to train yourself to have a better understanding of time. Just by having it vibrate on the hour every hour. You could make it a countdown timer so you can remind yourself to stop talking. Or any arbitrary period to remind yourself to take breaks. You could use some of the empty pins and add a motion sensor. Then you can keep track of your activity and if you don't move around enough each hour you can alert yourself. You can tailor everything to yourself exactly. But, as a reminder, do not get this wet. If you really want to use this as an activity tracker you'd be better off minimising it and adding a skin-safe water/sweat-proof enclosure. But for general time related body hacking this is a decent start.



LilyPad watch assembled and operational
Photo by [personal profile] chebe



I find myself wanting to use the same hardware controls in different projects again and again. But in various configurations. Can I make something modular, that I can reuse as needed?

Let's take the Colour Stealing circuit, actually let's take the version with a microphone.

Details )

Here's the whole system; wrist controller connected to power regulation and signal level shifter board and NeoPixel matrix. For the longer runs of wire I'm using thicker silicone wire that I have loosely plaited.

Overall it has the same problem as watches, in that the heavier section has a habit of shifting around, but if it annoys too much I suppose I could always stick it in place. The nice thing is that it all disassembles cleanly, making everything (not soldered to the protoboard) reusable.



Wrist Controller in the middle of it all
Photo by [personal profile] chebe



As I do more with electronics I get more complicated ideas, which necessitate learning more. At the moment I want to run 5V NeoPixels from a 3.3V microcontroller (i.e. Arduino Lilypad) which doesn't have a handy MOSFET pin (like the Adafruit Flora). I studied the NeoPixel best practices guide repeatedly. The new requirements boiled down to;

- 300 to 500 Ohm resistor on the Data In line of NeoPixel strip (which will be added to the NeoPixel end),
- capacitor (1000 µF, 6.3V or higher) across the battery terminals,
- logic shifter to up the 3.3V Data Out from the microcontroller to the 5V Data In for the NeoPixels.

Okay, great. Now where am I going to get the 5Vs from? 4AA rechargeable batteries would give me 4 x 1.2V = 4.8Vs, great. But, what if I accidentally grab alkaline batteries by mistake? That would result in 4 x 1.5V = 6Vs. Which is enough to damage the NeoPixels. To protect against thoughtlessness I would need a 5V voltage regulator. But, hang on, why don't I also add a 3.3V voltage regulator and remove the need to power the microcontroller with a separate power source? Just have to make sure everything has a common Ground.

Great, okay, so that's two voltage regulators. And the recommended bypass capacitors; 1µF on input and 0.1µF on output. This is a lot. Let's sketch it out. A few times by hand, then in Fritzing.

Process )

Then it's time to commit it to solder. It all fits on a half-size breadboard, and you can use any, but the ElectroCookie board has a continuous ground line if you bridge the break, which saves me work. Also, bonus cuteness.



Finished circuit soldered
Photo by [personal profile] chebe



Testing )
A long, long time ago, in a terrifying place known as "the real world" I acquired a fibre-optic LED umbrella. It was wonderful quality and lasted me a long time. Until one day the lights would not turn on, no matter how new the AA batteries I offered it were. Then it sat, half forgotten, in a dark cupboard, for a long time.

The place I bought it from no longer sold them, so earlier this year I decided to fix it. First step; take it apart and have a look see.

Take apart, reassemble )

That's it. Now go play with your own private starfield.



It works!
Photo by [personal profile] chebe

Further experiments with the LCD screen.

Install two libraries;
Adafruit_ILI9340
Adafruit_GFX


Uno pins;
- 13/SCLK to SCLK
- 12/MISO to MISO (not needed)
- 11/MOSI to MOSI
- 10/SS to CS
- 9 to DC
- 8 to RST

Arduino Uno breadboarded to 2.2inch LCD

Uno works smoothly
Photo by chebe





LilyPad Maincontroller pins;
- 13/SCLK to SCLK
- 12/MISO to MISO (not needed)
- 11/MOSI to MOSI
- 10 to CS
- 9 to DC
- 8 to RST

Arduino Lilypad Maincontroller breadboarded to 2.2inch LCD

Lilypad Maincontroller works as well!
Photo by chebe

In times gone by, when you caught a cold or got a cough, one of the things you could do to try and cure it was to tie a red flannel around your neck, under your clothes. Did the extra layer of warmth actually help, or was it just superstition? I'm not in a position to answer that, but it sparks some interesting questions.

For all its vibrant colours, traditional torque design, and dynamic nod-to-Newgrange kerbstone spirals, this piece strikes me as something futuristic, or interstellar. How Niki massaged the felt into these shapes I've no idea but, except for the torque clasp, this is one solid piece.

Mannequin wearing black tshirt, and a red felted torque piece

Red flannel neckpiece at Dublin Maker
Photo by chebe



Glorious details )

But for all the set-backs and frustrations, this piece turned out to be many peoples favourite. Everyone who tried it laughed, some almost split their sides. Niki has some good ideas on improvements for the next version, and at the very least there will be fewer microcontrollers involved! So keep an eye-out for the next revision.
Sorry it's been so quiet around here, things have been hectic in the analogue world. And to top it all off I'm running a series of four workshops on the LilyPad in TOG, starting Thursday. More hours in each day would come in handy right about now.

But, I haven't been idle. Remember way back when I made a simple accelerometer glove? Well, I'm working on a more elaborate matching pair now. PartFusion, a guy from the hackerspace, makes some really intense RGB daisy-chainable, sewable, LEDs. Armed with these, Adafruit's NeoPixel library, a couple of accelerometers, LilyPad Simple boards, and LiPo batteries, I had the fixings of something strong enough to help land planes.

I used some material from a free tshirt I acquired at some point, made a couple of armwarmers/gauntlets, with inside lining/pouch for the LilyPad Simple board itself. Some metal snaps and lots of conductive thread sewing later I've one strip done. It's still a work in progress, but I brought them along to one of the CoderDojo sessions, and people seemed to like them. I have a deadline for them, a concert I have tickets for, so hopefully they'll get finished soon.

Few photos )
Last we looked in on this project I'd just added in the adapter for the keypad and a battery holder. Since then a couple of things happened.

One; in the two-and-a-half years since starting this project, the silver on the conductive thread has started to corrode. This manifested first as the programmed time delays no longer seeming to work right, and then with an un-even light disruption across the LED grid (this happens anyway, but wasn't noticeable before this). So I rather carefully went over every single trace of conductive thread with a thin paintbrush and a bottle of fray-stop glue. Hopefully it will slow down further corrosion.

Two; I got my hands on a IR-detector unit, and wanted to include it in the top (as talked about in the Dublin Maker Faire post). To make this possible the keypad-adapter would have to double up as an ir-adapter. But this required a change of circuit layout.

The keypad has five wires; 3 output, 1 led, 1 ground. The ir-detector has four wires; 1 output, 1 led, 1 ground, 1 power. The adapter has five slots. But two of them are pins 0 and 1 (Rx & Tx) and I had trouble getting them to work consistently. So to fit everything in I decided to move the power and ground lines out to their own adapter. But where was I to find a two-pin breakout board? They come in large, small (used for the existing adapter), and that's it. *brainwave* I remembered a set of empty LED boards I hadn't gotten around to using.



And sure enough, two separate connections, just add headers! I pulled out the existing stitching and stitched the new layout in. The power lines are actually run along the back in channels of bias-binding for insulation because the whole thing is so crowded at this point.



Turned it on, fixed up the code (new pin numbers), adjusted the timing on the patterns, and tried my hand at interrupt coding. However, before I could finish it up, my top needed to go off with [twitter.com profile] Jeffrey_Roe and [twitter.com profile] PartFusion to NY MakerFaire to represent tog, so development of new features was promptly abandoned, to be continued once it returns. (Although, I hear it was a bit wet, so I expect my top probably stayed in somewhere nice and dry.) *edit* Spot the LED top. But now I have a definite list of things that need doing, and then it will actually be finished!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4.a

Lilypad Holders

2012-Aug-08, Wednesday 12:51 pm
Here's something I meant to talk about months ago. Lilypad microcontrollers are meant to be sewn into projects. Which can be time consuming, and seriously limits their resusability. (Also, I'd be much more willing to wash my e-garment if I could detach the microcontroller first.) So people have been coming up with shields/adapters to make their Lilypad projects more modular.

One that's pretty cool, and uses a 3-D printer, is the Lilypad Holder from mizliz via thingiverse. Namit very kindly printed me up a couple.



They fit the original microcontroller, the Simple Board (although it doesn't use all the holes), and even the XBee shield. The board is kept in place with a magnet glued into the little hole beneath where the board goes.

But, as I was filing out the holes I realised something; the metal snaps point up. Which means either the FTDI header is face down (making it hard to reach and program) or the other components are loose and not connected to the base material. That could be changed by altering the 3-D model to invert the outside ring though, probably.

But then I also realised the wires (wires!?) from the snaps are soldered directly onto the Lilypad pads themselves. Meaning any board you use with this holder is permanently committed. It's still a really cool idea, just doesn't match the way I work.

There are also a couple of nifty soft-circuit ones I came across that seem like great ideas, but a fair amount of work to create; like the Frogr shield, or a soft-holder also from mizliz, but fixing the direction the snaps point.

And, well, it seems that the powers that be were paying attention, because now there exists a Lilypad Microcontroller (Simple Board version) with built-in snaps! The SimpleSnap. It also has a battery attached, which means it must be removed from a project before washing, but that's a small trade-off. And to complement it there is a SimpleSnap Protoboard as well. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on these!
The Electro-Sewing Workshop was last Friday, and I feel it went very well. Even with starting on Irish-Standard-Time and forcing the class to sit through a slide-deck, there were seven very pretty LED-flowers two-and-a-half hours later. Definitely a success!

Here's a couple of pics from the night.



Aren't they pretty! I am planning to write up a how-to for these, but truth be known, they follow essentially the same method as for the LED-horns from last year. Nonetheless, people seemed rather enthused about the whole experience :)

I've also gotten my hands on the new LilyPad ProtoSnap Development Board. It's very nifty; all the main components of the LilyPad range, pre-connected on one board! So you can practice your programming, or simply getting the components to work together the way you want, without having to worry about any of that sewing malarkey. Then, if you want, you can snap the pieces apart and sew them into an actual project!

I plugged it in just yesterday and was highly amused to find a pre-loaded program that tests most of the components (make sure to play with the switches!). But, looking closely, I've noticed that only the RGB-LED, the five white LEDs, and the momentary push-button are connected to actual sew-holes on the Simple Microcontroller Board. The rest of them are connected through paths that would be available on the full Microcontroller Board, but that aren't exposed on the Simple board. Makes sense, seeing as how the LEDs/button take up all the existing holes! (Still, I imagine the numbers printed on next to the other components could get confusing for someone just starting out. Speaking of, there's a nice tutorial available to get you up and running.)

And all this has inspired me to maybe run a LilyPad course in tog in January. We'll see.


In other news, I don't have any photos from Octocon, but we made the same flowers as shown above, and you can check out the photos from Darklight (where I spent some time teaching people to solder) in the Gallery. (Can you spot me, or rather my Dresden Dolls hoodie?) That's almost it for my busy October. *phew*

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