Like the LilyPad Arduino boards, the Arduino Gemma is designed to create interactive projects you can wear. It can be sewn into clothing and other fabric with conductive thread and be connected to sensors and actuators.

After you explored the Getting Started page and learn how to move the first steps with it, it’s time to explore its features with a real project.

Becky Stern from Adafruit recently created a tutorial for making a vibrating mindfulness bracelet and learn the basics of wearables with Gemma! It’s like that “stand up every hour” feature you find on smart watches, but DIY.

The guide shows you how to solder up the circuit using an Arduino Gemma microcontroller, small pager motor, as well as how to whip up a cute linked leather bracelet to hold everything.

Build yourself a buzzing bracelet for subtle haptic feedback as time passes! It’s great for reminding yourself to get up and walk away from your desk for a few minutes each hour, or just as a way to have a new awareness of how the perception of passing time varies based on what you’re doing.

You’ll whip up a vibrating motor circuit using a transistor, resistor, and diode, and use GEMMA to control the frequency of vibration in between low-power microcontroller naps. The circuit lives inside a linked leather/rubber bracelet, but you could build it into whatever you please. This project involves some precision soldering, but is otherwise quite easy!

Read the bill of materials, follow the steps and create your Buzzing Mindfulness Bracelet on Adafruit.

Like the LilyPad Arduino boards, the Arduino Gemma is designed to create interactive projects you can wear. It can be sewn into clothing and other fabric with conductive thread and be connected to sensors and actuators.

After you explored the Getting Started page and learn how to move the first steps with it, it’s time to explore its features with a real project.

Becky Stern from Adafruit recently created a tutorial for making a vibrating mindfulness bracelet and learn the basics of wearables with Gemma! It’s like that “stand up every hour” feature you find on smart watches, but DIY.

The guide shows you how to solder up the circuit using an Arduino Gemma microcontroller, small pager motor, as well as how to whip up a cute linked leather bracelet to hold everything.

Build yourself a buzzing bracelet for subtle haptic feedback as time passes! It’s great for reminding yourself to get up and walk away from your desk for a few minutes each hour, or just as a way to have a new awareness of how the perception of passing time varies based on what you’re doing.

You’ll whip up a vibrating motor circuit using a transistor, resistor, and diode, and use GEMMA to control the frequency of vibration in between low-power microcontroller naps. The circuit lives inside a linked leather/rubber bracelet, but you could build it into whatever you please. This project involves some precision soldering, but is otherwise quite easy!

Read the bill of materials, follow the steps and create your Buzzing Mindfulness Bracelet on Adafruit.

The Maker Faire Bay Area is celebrating 10 years of making! The weekend is starting  and we’ll be there celebrating t0o. We invite makers, artists, designers, teachers, educators and passionate DIYers to visit our team at the Arduino booth (#2223) right next to Atmel! We’ll be showcasing cool demos of Arduino Create, Arduino Materia 101, Arduino at Heart Primo and you’ll be able to have a close look to some of the new boards like Arduino Gemma.

On Saturday at 12:30PM  Massimo Banzi will be on the Center Stage for his traditional keynote on the State of Arduino. You are welcome to attend and learn about the latest developments in Arduino open-source microcontroller ecosystem.

If you are coming with kids, don’t miss Teach Physical computing to kids workshop, with sessions running the whole weekend!

Last night Massimo Banzi was in New York City and met LadyAda and Phil Torrone for an exclusive interview during Ask an Engineer session.
They talked about many cool things starting from the history of Arduino to the forthcoming availability of Arduino Gemma, the Microsoft/Arduino partnership on opensource projects and the #TeamArduinoCC campaign!

Enjoy the video:

Following our previous announcement, we are happy to inform you that Arduino IDE 1.6.4 is now available for download.

Here is a brief list of important changes:

• Added support to the new Arduino Gemma
• Tools submenu shows selected subentry. Thanks Paul Stoffregen
• We added a command line interface to Boards and Libraries Managers: see –install-boards and –install-library actions in the documentation
• We restored line highlighting when the sketch contains an error. This was actually a regression, something that stopped working since 1.5.7
• Fixed an error that left the Tools > Port menu greyed out

And the most important feature: you can add additional, non official, boards to the Boards Manager by just adding a url in the preferences.
Click on File menu, then click Preferences. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find this new text field:

Fill the text field with the urls provided by your board manufacturer, separating each with a comma. Here you can find some example URLs.

There also are many other fixes and improvements. The complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

We are also happy to see the list of available libraries growing day after day: today we reached 190.

Arduino Gemma preview – Final board coming late autumn

During his saturday morning presentation at Maker Faire Rome, Massimo Banzi gave a preview of a new collaboration and a new board: Adafruit Gemma becomes officially Arduino Gemma, a tiny but powerful wearable microcontroller board in a 27mm diameter package.

Powered by an Attiny85 and programmable with the Arduino IDE over USB, anyone will be able to easily create wearable projects with all the advantages of being part of the Arduino family. The board will be default-supported in the Arduino IDE, equipped with an on/off switch and a microUSB connector.

The Attiny85 is a great processor because despite being so small, it has 8K of flash and 5 I/O pins, including analog inputs and PWM ‘analog’ outputs. It was designed with a USB bootloader so you can plug it into any computer and reprogram it over a USB port (it uses 2 of the 5 I/O pins, leaving you with 3). Ideal for small & simple projects sewn with conductive thread, the Arduino Gemma fits the needs of most of entry-level wearable creations including reading sensors and driving addressable LED pixels.
After the fruitful joint effort developing Arduino Micro, once more the Arduino Gemma has been developed in collaboration with Adafruit Industries, one of the main leaders of the Maker movement. Arduino Gemma will be available for purchase on the Arduino Store and Adafruit Industries starting late autumn 2014.

Technical specifications:
Microcontroller: ATtiny85
Operating Voltage: 3.3V
Input Voltage (recommended): 4-16V via battery port
Input Voltage (limits): 3-18V
Digital I/O Pins: 3
PWM Channels: 2
Analog Input Channels: 1
DC Current per I/O Pin: 40 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin: 150 mA
Flash Memory: 8 KB (ATtiny85) of which 2.5 KB used by bootloader
SRAM: 0.5 KB (ATtiny85)
EEPROM: 0.5 KB (ATtiny85)
Clock Speed: 8 MHz
MicroUSB for USB Bootloader
JST 2-PH for external battery