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.

Join us this Friday at noon PDT for a Hack Chat with Tenaya Hurst of Arduino. If you’ve been one of the big Maker Faires over the last few years (or innumerable other live events) and stopped by the Arduino area you’ve probably met Tenaya. She is the Education Accounts Manager for Arduino and loves working with wearable electronics.

Come and discuss maker education and the role Arduino is playing in getting our students excited about electronics, and STEAM education in general. Tenaya will also be discussing a new wearable tech kit she’s been working on. We hope to see the gear in person at Bay Area Maker Faire next week.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging.

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Despite what my wife says, I have absolutely no evidence that I snore. After all, I’ve never actually heard me snoring. But I’ll take her word for it that I do, and that it bothers her, so perhaps I should be a sport and build this snore-detecting vibrating sleep mask so she can get a few winks more.

Part wearable tech and part life hack, [mopluschen]’s project requires a little of the threadworker’s skill. The textile part of the project is actually pretty simple, and although [mopluschen] went with a custom mask made from fabric and foam shoulder pads, it should be possible to round up a ready-made mask that could be easily modified. The electronics are equally simple – an Arduino with a sound sensor module and a couple of Lilypad Vibe boards. The mic rides just above the snore resonating chamber and the vibrators are right over the eyes. When your snore volume exceeds a preset threshold, the motors wake you up.

Whether this fixes the underlying problem or just evens the score with your sleep partner is debatable, but either way there’s some potential here. And not just for snore-correction – a similar system could detect a smoke alarm and help rouse the hearing impaired. But if the sewing part of this project puts you off, you should probably check out [Jenny List]’s persuasive argument that sewing is not just for cosplayers anymore.

[Alain Mauer] wanted to build something like a Google Glass setup using a small OLED screen. A 0.96 inch display was too large, but a 0.66 inch one worked well. Combining an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, and battery, and some optics, he built glasses that will show the readout from a multimeter.

You’d think it was simple to pull this off, but it isn’t for a few reasons as [Alain] discovered. The device cost about 70 Euro and you can see a video of the result, below.

The video shows a common problem and its solution. You are probing a mains circuit and have to look away to read the voltmeter. With the glasses, you don’t have to look away, the voltage floats in your field of vision.

These reminded us of Pedosaglass which we covered earlier. Of course, it used a different optical solution. We’ve also seen Google Glass knockoffs as part of our Hackaday prize entries.

Looking for a fun junk box hack? Have one of those old Nokia phones that (in contrast to your current smartphone) just won’t give up the ghost? Tinkernut has a nice hack for you: making a smart watch from an old cell phone. Specifically, this project details how to make a smart watch that displays time, date, incoming calls and texts from a Nokia 1100 cell phone display and a few other bits.

This 3-video series covers how to extract the display, connect it to an Arduino and conecting that to an Android phone over Bluetooth. We’ve seen a few similar smart(ish) watch builds, but this one covers the whole process well, including building the Android app in the MIT AppInventor. Sure, the final result is not as polished as an Apple Watch, but it’s a lot cheaper and easier to hack…

Bicycle riders can never be too visible: the more visible you are, the less chance there is someone will hit you. That’s the idea behind the Arduibag, a neat open-source project from [Michaël D’Auria] and [Stéphane De Graeve]. The project combines a joystick that mounts on the handlebars with a dot matrix LED display in a backpack. By moving the joystick, the user can indicate things such as that they are turning, stopping, say thank you or show a hazard triangle to warn of an accident.

The whole project is built from simple components, such as an Adafruit LED matrix and a Bluno (an Arduino-compatible board with built-in Bluetooth 4.0) combined with a big battery that drives the LED matrix. This connects to the joystick, which is in a 3D printed case that clips onto the handlebars for easy use. It looks like a fairly simple build, with the larger components being mounted on a board that fits into the backpack and holds everything in place. You then add a clear plastic cover to part of the backpack over the LED matrix, and you are ready to hit the road, hopefully without actually hitting the road.

Like any good project, [Michaël] and [Stéphane] aren’t finished with it yet: they are also looking for ways to improve it. In particular, they want to reduce the number of batteries, as there is currently a large battery that drives the display and another smaller one that drives the Arduino.

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.

When we think of wearable technologies, ballet shoes aren’t the first devices that come to mind. In fact, the E-Traces pointé shoes by [Lesia Trubat] may be the first ever “connected ballet shoe.” This project captures the movement and pressure of the dancer’s feet and provides this data to a phone over Bluetooth.

The shoes are based on the Lilypad Arduino clone, which is designed for sewing into wearables. It appears that 3 force sensitive resistors are used as analog pressure sensors, measuring the force applied on the ground by the dancer’s feet. A Lilypad Accelerometer measures the acceleration of the feet.

This data is combined in an app running on an iPhone, which allows the dancer to “draw” patterns based on their dance movements. This creates a video of the motion based on the dance performed, and also collects data that can be used to analyze the dance movements after the fact.

While these shoes are focused on ballet, [Lesia] points out that the same technique could be extended to other forms of dance for both training and visualization purposes.

Google Glass kind of came and went, leaving one significant addition to the English language. Even Google itself used the term “glasshole” for people who used the product in a creepy way. We can’t decide if wearing an obviously homemade set of glasses like the ones made by [Jordan Fung] are more creepy, give you more hacker cred, or just make you look like a Borg. Maybe some combination of all of those. While the cost and complexity of developing for Google Glass was certainly a barrier for hacking on that hardware, this project is just begging for you to build your own and run with the concept.

[Jordan’s] build, called Pedosa Glass, really is pretty respectable for a self-built set up. The Arduino Nano is a bit bulky, and the three push buttons take up some room, but it doesn’t kill the ability to mount them in a glasses form-factor. An FLCoS display lets you see the output of the software which [Jordan] is still developing. Right now features include a timer and a flashlight that uses the head-mounted white LED. Not much, we admit, but enough to prove out the hardware and the whole point would be to add software you wanted.

Admittedly, it isn’t exactly like Google Glass. Although both use FLCoS displays, Pedosa Glass uses a display meant for a camera viewfinder, so you don’t really see through it. Still, there might be some practical use for a little display mounted in your field of vision. The system will improve with a better CPU that is easier to connect to the network with sensors like an accelerometer — there’s plenty of room to iterate on this project. Then again, you do have an entire second ear piece to work with if you wanted to expand the system.

Check out the video demo after the break.

We’ve covered cool head-mounted displays before. Some of them have been pretty sophisticated. However, Pedosa Glass looks like the best bet to use as a base for your own explorations.

Giant wristwatches are so hot right now. This is a good thing, because it means they’re available at many price points. Aim just low enough on the scale and you can have a pre-constructed chassis for building your own smartwatch. That’s exactly what [benhur] did, combining a GY-87 10-DOF module, an I²C OLED display, and an Arduino Pro Mini.

The watch uses one button to cycle through its different modes. Date and time are up first, naturally. The next screen shows the current temperature, altitude, and barometric pressure. Compass mode is after that, and then a readout showing your step count and kilocalories burned.

In previous iterations, the watch communicated over Bluetooth to Windows Phone, but it drew too much power. With each new hardware rev, [benhur] made significant strides in battery life, going from one hour to fourteen to a full twenty-fours.

Take the full tour of [benhur]’s smartwatch after the break. He’s open to ideas for the next generation, so share your insight with him in the comments. We’d like to see some kind of feedback system that tells us when we’ve been pounding away at the Model M for too long. 

[via Embedded Lab]