Phone screens keep getting bigger. Computer screens keep getting bigger. Why not a large trackpad to use as a mouse? [MaddyMaxey] had that thought and with a few components and some sewing skills created a trackpad in a tablecloth.

The electronics in this project are right off the shelf. A Flora board for the brains and 4 capacitive touch boards. If you haven’t seen the Flora, it is a circular-shaped Arduino made for sewing into things. The real interesting part is the construction. If you haven’t worked with conductive fabric and thread, this will be a real eye-opener. [Maddy’s] blog has a lot of information about her explorations into merging fabric and electronics and also covers things like selecting conductive thread.

As an optional feature, [MaddyMaxey] added vibration motors that provide haptic feedback to her touchpad. We were hoping for a video, but there doesn’t seem to be one. The code is just the example program for the capacitive sensor boards, although you can see in a screenshot the additions for the haptic motors.

We’ve covered the Flora before, by the way. You could also make a ridiculously large touch surface using tomography, although the resolution isn’t quite good enough for mouse purposes.

Snow skiing looks easy, right? You just stay standing, and gravity does the work. The reality is that skiing is difficult for beginners to learn. [19mkarpawich] loves to ski, but he was frustrated seeing crying kids on skis along with screaming parents trying to coach them. Inspired by wearable electronics, he took an Arduino, an old jacket, some LEDs, and created Ski Buddy.

The brains in the jacket consist of an Adafruit Flora, accelerometer, and a battery pack. Conductive thread connects to LED sequins. The jacket can help teach linking turns, parallel skiing, hockey stops, and gradual pizza stopping. In addition to the build details and some notes on where not to place sensors (doubtlessly learned the hard way), [19mkarpawich] also does a detailed explanation of the software and how to use the jacket.

You can see a very short video demonstration of Ski Buddy below. We’ve seen more wearables lately, some of them pretty creative. Maybe it is time to learn how to sew if you can’t already.

In the future, we'll all live in "Live Cubes," tiny homes that restrict your energy and water use

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The post A Peek at Hacking in an Energy Starved Future appeared first on Make:.

In the future, we'll all live in "Live Cubes," tiny homes that restrict your energy and water use

Read more on MAKE

The post A Peek at Hacking in an Energy Starved Future appeared first on Make:.

Read more on MAKE

Have you ever wondered how far your dog actually runs when you take it to the park? You could be a standard consumer and purchase a GPS tracking collar for $100 or more, or you could follow [Becky Stern's] lead and build your own simple but effective GPS tracking harness.

[Becky] used two FLORA modules for this project; The FLORA main board, and the FLORA GPS module. The FLORA main board is essentially a small, sewable Arduino board. The GPS module obviously provides the tracking capabilities, but also has built-in data logging functionality. This means that [Becky] didn’t need to add complexity with any special logging circuit. The GPS coordinates are logged in a raw format, but they can easily be pasted into Google Maps for viewing as demonstrated by [Becky] in the video after the break. The system uses the built-in LED on the FLORA main board to notify the user when the GPS has received a lock and that the program is running.

The whole system runs off of three AAA batteries which, according to [Becky], can provide several hours of tracking. She also installed a small coin cell battery for the GPS module. This provides reserve power for the GPS module so it can remember its previous location. This is not necessary, but it provides a benefit in that the GPS module can remember it’s most recent location and therefore discover its location much faster.

Bike sharing systems like New York's Citi Bike may be taking off, but it's doubtful that many participants can find every station without checking a map. Thankfully, Adafruit has unveiled a smart helmet project that could help at least a few of those riders get to their destinations while keeping their eyes on the road. The DIY effort feeds locations to an Arduino-based Flora board and its positioning add-ons, which in turn use a string of NeoPixel LEDs on the helmet as turn indicators. Commuters just have to watch for blinking lights to know where to go next. While the system isn't easy to set up when cyclists have to manually enter coordinates, it is flexible: the open-source code lets it adapt to most any bike sharing system or headpiece. As long as you can get over looking like a Christmas tree on wheels while you navigate, you can build a smart helmet of your own using the instructions at the source link.

Filed under: GPS, Transportation, Alt

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Source: Adafruit

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Adafruit's Flora wearable platform is barely a year old, yet it already has a little sibling on the way -- and we do mean little. The newer Gemma is Arduino-programmable over USB like its relative, but measures just over half the size of the Flora at an inch in diameter. It's even bordering on cute, as far as circuit boards go. Before developing any grand visions of wearable computers, though, be aware that Gemma's features scale down with its size: there's only three input/output pins, and a limited amount of memory won't let it handle more than about a dozen of Adafruit's NeoPixel lights. All the same, any aspiring tailor willing to trade flexibility for subtlety in a costume will likely want to sign up for notification of the Gemma's in-stock date at the source link.

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: Adafruit

• Arduino Due
• Arduino Explora
• Adafruit Flora
• Freaduino Micro
• Olympia Arno