Planet Arduino

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.

[Becky Stern] has created the mindfulness bracelet, a wearable which looks great and serves an important purpose. The bracelet buzzes every hour to remind you to stand up and take a break from work, soldering, gaming, or whatever it is you may be doing. The bracelet is made up of interlinked figure 8 shapes of leather, though [Becky] says rubber from a bicycle inner tube works great as well. The final shape reminds us of the link belts sometimes found on lathes or other industrial equipment. The links are the perfect size to slip an Arduino Gemma in, along with a battery and vibrating motor. A NPN transistor, diode, and resistor round out the entire bill of materials for this design. This bracelet is a heck of a lot cheaper than the Apple watch feature which inspired it!

The time interval is set in the code to 1 hour, and can be adjusted by the user. Although the times are stored in milliseconds, the design does use the ATtiny85’s Watchdog Timer (WDT) to conserve power. This means the time can drift up to 30 seconds per hour, which is fine in this application.

Click past the break to see the bracelet in action!

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, wearable hacks

Today, May 16th, 2015 Massimo Banzi, CEO and co-founder of Arduino, announced at Maker Faire during the “State of Arduino” keynote that Adafruit is manufacturing Arduino’s for Arduino.cc in New York, New York, USA! 

Limor “Ladyada” Fried said:

“Adafruit and Arduino.cc have been working together on open-source software and hardware for almost 10 years in a variety of ways, this is expanded partnership and manufacturing is part of our collective goal to make the world a better place through the sharing of ideas, code and hardware with our communities –

We’re currently manufacturing the Arduino  Gemma with Arduino.cc right here in New York City at the Adafruit factory, it instantly became a top seller and we’re looking forward to bringing our manufacturing expertise and processes to start shipping Arduinos right here from the USA as soon as possible!”

Take a look at this video interview of Massimo by Make directly from Maker Faire Bay Area and containing other important announcements:

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:

3D-print these soft, flexible spikes and light them up with full-color programmable LEDs

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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

Becky Stern, director of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries, shares ten fabulous and fashionable projects you can try yourself.

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