LilyPad Arduino

Body Boards — A Guide to Wearable Microcontrollers

Body Boards — A Guide to Wearable Microcontrollers

Created by Leah Buechley of MIT, and introduced commercially in 2007, the LilyPad was the first board to feature sew-through contacts for stitching soft circuits. Now there’s a plethora of options in “ready-to-wear” microcontrollers. Here’s a look at a few of the standouts.

Continue Reading
Encouraging Girls to Hack and Make

Encouraging Girls to Hack and Make

After working as a hardware engineer, attending grad school at Harvard, and working in science and engineering education for 10 years, I decided to go back to my community last year and start a program for girls.

Continue Reading
LilyPad MP3 Released

LilyPad MP3 Released

The new Lilypad MP3 board is out and it looks pretty sweet! Lilypads are washable Arduinos designed for wearable electronics. You can sew them onto your clothing and wire them up with conductive thread. The new MP3 board is basically an Arduino — it’s got the standard ATmega 328p with Arduino bootloader. However, like the […]

Continue Reading
Sharing Senses with onemile

Sharing Senses with onemile

How cool would it be to see through someone else’s eyes, or to sense how fast they’re breathing or how loud their location might be? We can’t really do that yet, but that doesn’t stop people from experimenting with technology to at least get a taste of that goal. onemile is a Master’s project by […]

Continue Reading
A Blanket That Knows its Own Shape

A Blanket That Knows its Own Shape

Interesting soft-circuits application from a group of architects at the University of Toronto: A blanket with a network of soft tilt sensors on its surface that can report information about its own shape and, by inference, the shape of an object that it is draped over.

Continue Reading
Stage Combat Training Shirt w/Lilypad Arduino

Stage Combat Training Shirt w/Lilypad Arduino

Instructables user grossmr1 teaches stage combat, and was looking for a more efficient way to communicate sword target points to her students than language or pointing. The garment she designed features LEDs at various target points, and conductive pads on the fingers and thumb of one gauntlet. She can select which of the various target […]

Continue Reading