Webelow Wear

This is a neat DIY offered on Instructables; a switch that turns on an LED light by literally stroking the hairs of conductive and resistive thread. Using  neoprene to hold each thread, the user’s strokes turns on a LED light powered by a 3V coin cell battery.  Simple, practical and cost effective.

A lot of potential in the wearables world. Imagine gloves that when worn and rubbed together trigger the heating element, instantly warming the user’s hands.   Could the threads be sensitive enough to detect wind movement?  We’re very curious.

We’re not the typical green-friendly group, but the more we learn about our affects on the environment and the cost of living as the  society we have become, the more we realise we need to change.  Our good friend  and WW contributor came up with a brilliant way for us to learn about how we can help ourselves, help the planet and help others help themselves. Through a video series we will learn how to move away from store bought household products and replace them with natural and home made items.  We filmed our first video yesterday and made lip balm and bath salts using products that cost much less than anything you can buy in a store.  Did we mention we only used natural and organic products?  It’s all very exciting and we look forward to making other products, learning a lot more and sharing it with you!

Stay tuned for more updates.

This is very impressive. The road to  integrating technology into clothing has been a fun and interesting ride. The latest stop on this innovation train is the Textile Breadboard from PlugandWear. Weaving non-conductive yarns with metal wire, the soft and flexible material is strong enough to withstand soldering without burning and gentle enough to easily be embedded into any design. You can find the prototyping breadboard at PlugandWear in the next few weeks.

It will be fun to play with this.

Via [Fashioning Technology]

We got our EL Escudo last week and put it to work right away.  The first thing we learned was that the Barebones board doesn’t work with any standard Arduino shields out of the box because of differences in the pin-outs.  I was being cheap and adventurous when I put together this BBB kit and it has served it’s purpose up until now.  Sometimes, being cheap and adventurous only leads to more work in the end.  Arduino shields are getting popular so keep that in mind when choosing a prototyping platform.

In order to get things going, we had to mate the pin-outs and power from the Arduino to the El Escudo.  This wasn’t a huge deal to link +5v to +v and ground to any of the ground pins on the board. There is some significance to pin 10 in the code but we’re still working through that.

We used the CoolLight inverter Sparkfun suggested but we also bought a cheaper one to mess around with.  The cheaper inverter has a 3v input rating and it doesn’t work as well for our applications.  Even directly powering our panels with the smaller inverter from a 3v power source just doesn’t give the brightness that we want.  The tiny inverter also heats up quickly.

Connecting the inverter to the board was very easy.  There are 4 connections, 2 for inverter output  and two for power.  The 9v cables on the ends of the inverters make them easy to alligator clip or connect to a battery pack.

The example code and library is pretty basic.  It all works around the basic on/off functionality of the lights.  The pin constants are A-H with A starting at pin 2.  We found that the EL_PULSE function is a good time-saver.  We wrote some simple code to turn 3 lights on/off and delay.  Everything seems to work fine except for the fading.   That’s not a huge concern right now, so, we’ll revisit fading at another time.

Once everything worked (usb powered from BBB) we switched over to the lilypad with USB power.  This worked well.

Overall we’re still very pleased with the outcome but we did by some triacs to take it further than the prototyping stage.  The very funny part of this story is the other product they offered the same day -The EL Sequencer.

Sparkfun EL Sequencer

EL Escudo does sounds cooler than EL sequencer and has a cooler shape but honestly, this board is an all-in-one board and makes the other board look like a tire with no wheels.  It has an ATmega168V chip onboard and it’s compatible with the Lilypad Arduino libraries.  There is an additional LiPo power connection which makes a lot of sense.  The only downside is that there is no array of inputs.  There is only a footprint for a wireless board.

So, for prototyping and using a real Arduino, EL Escudo is better.  For a finished product that already has a microprocessor on board, the EL Sequencer is a good choice.  For the most flexibility, just use some triacs and make your own breakout board.  Stay tuned for more on the breakout board.

RicSeasons