Welcome to the Interactive Wearable Backpack Workshop Site
This workshop has been held in FablabTorino by Davide Gomba and Arianna Merlo, Giulia Nota and Giovanna Esposito from BATNA.
The Program of the Workshop
| Date | Content |
|---|---|
| lesson #1 - 19:00 - 23:00, 23/2/2015 | Lasercutting and Assembly |
| lesson #2 - 19:00 - 23:00, 27/2/2015 | Intro to Arduino |
| lesson #3 - 19:00 - 23:00, 2/3/2015 | Arduino + Assembly |
| lesson #4 - 19:00 - 23:00, 5/3/2015 | Finalizing |
Lasercutting and Assembly
BATNA introduced the bagpacks they manufactured. Each user was asked to choose different designs that were lately being lasercutted. You can see the designs in the "Cover Designs" Folder of this repository (or in the Zipped folder) or in the final pictures. Basic assembly of the cover and of the backpacks in the end of our first lesson.
Intro to Arduino
The idea behind the workshop was enpowering non-technical wearable tinkerers in the creation of this interactive backpack. The "control unit" is a glove, with index/middle/ring/thumb fingers respectively sewed on pin 3, 10, 11 and GND on the Lilypad Arduino USB. A Strip made of 8 WS2812b RGB Adressable LEDs is hooked up to pin 9, controlled using Adafruit Neopixel Library.
General knowledge of the lilypad and Arduino in general ranged on the Arduino Alphabet (aka digitalWrite, digitalRead, AnalogRead, AnalogWrite, a basic use of the Serial Port and Pull-ups. As part of the kit, we've been also toying around Analog Pressure Sensor from Plug'n'Wear.
Arduino and Assembly: The Glove
Long (1m) 4 pin flat cables were tied and then sewed to the "control" fingers (in this case, index/middle/ring/thumb). Donductive Thread will lately tie the final copper part of the cable to the fingertips. Long process, short description.
On the same lesson, the other side of the cables were soldered to male snap connectors.
Female Snap connectors were soldered on the lilypad, à la Lilypad Simple Snap, as well as battery pack. You might enquire why we haven't used lithium batteries: LED consumption and battery life made us choose for 4 rechargable, NI-MH 1.2V batteries. I'll update this guide if I'll be proven wrong.
