Tag: featured

Buzzing Mindfulness Bracelet with GEMMA

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!

Before you begin, make sure you’ve read the following prerequisite guides:

For this project, you will need:

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Bowtie with LED Sequins

Bring some bling to your formalwear! Don’t be left out when your prom date shows up in her twinkling Sparkle Skirt, add some LEDs to your bow tie! This beginner project is a great way to get into e-textiles. No programming or soldering required, just a bit of stitching.

You don’t need much background to start this project, just check out the Conductive Thread guide for tips on working with this tricky textile.

For this project you will need:

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Smart Phone Mittens

Do your fingers get frosty while texting? Have you missed a call because you couldn’t get your gloves off fast enough? Maybe you’ve tried a pair of the touch screen gloves available seemingly everywhere, but you just prefer mittens and like to knit! This pattern guides you through a basic pair of mittens knit on double pointed needles (DPNs).

Conductive yarn is knit with the working yarn as one strand in the upper hand and thumb of the mitten, enabling you to perform basic tasks on your smart phone or tablet like answering calls, pinching and zooming on maps, or switching the track on your latest favorite album.

Check out this pattern on Ravelry!

Materials

Yarn: Two skeins of worsted or aran weight yarn (shown: Kollage Yarns Glisten in 7317), stainless steel thin conductive yarn

Needles: US size 7 (4.5mm) double pointed needles, or adjust to obtain gauge of 5 stitches per inch in stockinette stitch

Optional: DPNs in one size smaller than main needles for tighter wrist ribbing

Notions: scrap yarn, stitch markers, tapestry needle

Sizes: small (medium, large)

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Zipper Switch with Conductive Thread

Here’s a fun way to make your clothes more interactive– you can turn a zipper into a switch for activating lights, sounds, and more using stainless steel conductive thread.

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

The switch works like a momentary pushbutton. As the zipper pull travels along the teeth, two pads of conductive thread are bridged, momentarily creating an electrical connection.

This connection can be sensed by a microcontroller like FLORA or GEMMA with an activated internal pullup resistor, or be used in place of a push button in circuits like the TV-B-Gone or audio FX boards. Continue reading for the full tutorial.

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Sunscreen Reminder Hat

Help remember to reapply your sunblock by building a reminder right into your hat! This sewable circuit uses a FLORA sewable microcontroller and its compatible UV index sensor to sense the sun and play a tune on a piezo buzzer when its time to refresh your SPF.

This is a good beginner project because it doesn’t have very many parts and requires no soldering. For this project you will need:

Before you begin, please check out the following prerequisite guides:

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Nautical LED Friendship Bracelet

Light up those warm nights at the beach or summer camp with this simple soft circuit bracelet.

We were inspired by Etsy’s nautical knot bracelet tutorial and when we read the word “rhinestones” we immediately substituted LEDs. Read on to stitch up your own illuminated friendship bracelet!

Supplies

For this project you will need:

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Cell Phone Blocking Pocket

Pesky phone always ringing at just the wrong time? Worried about your phone transmitting data even when it’s off? Make a simple cell phone sleeve from conductive fabric to block RF transmissions.

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Unlock Your Phone with NFC – Ring & Manicure

Unlock your phone by just picking it up! No more pesky password or gesture PIN, just scan an NFC tag! This guide covers creating an NFC ring, putting an NFC tag in your nail polish, modding your Android installation to read tags from the lockscreen, and creating an automation toolchain to unlock the phone when the desired tag is scanned.

The software side of this project can be pretty tricky, and even scary if you’ve never jailbroken a phone before, which is required to get the phone to read NFC from the lockscreen.

However, you can still do a lot of fun projects without modding your Android install, just skip that step and head straight to the page about NFC+ Tasker Automation. You won’t be able to log into your phone with your nail polish, but you could do all kinds of other things like start playing Barry White when you place your phone on the nightstand (just sayin’).The following pages were very helpful while making this guide:

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