Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Wearable Arduino projects
In this section, you'll build projects that you'll wear as a part of your clothing or accessor-
ies. Hopefully, this will expand your concept of where you might be able to creatively use
Arduino. Let's get started.
The project for this section is a wearable pin that will indicate your direction through a cir-
cular LED set. You could wear this type of device on an armband, like a watch, or pin it on
your clothes, just to prove that you are not only technically savvy, but have a keen fashion
sense. However, as we are talking about robots, you can actually add these wearables to
your robot to give the outside world some indication of what the robot is thinking.
To start, you'll need an Arduino board built for fashion. For this project, you'll use the
factor; it looks like the following image:
The Arduino FLORA unit is interesting for a couple of reasons. Its form factor is certainly
one of them, but it is also designed to go into wearable applications and is even washable
(but don't try it with the battery attached). In this particular application, you'll be using the
FLORA with two of its accessories to build a device that can indicate direction. To do this,
you'll need both a way of finding the direction as well as a way of indicating direction. To
find direction, you'll add the FLORA Accelerometer/Compass module, the LSM303, avail-
able at
www.adafruit.com
. The following is an image of this device, with the FLORA on
the right-hand side for size comparison:
