Visualising Physiological Data in Wearable Technology – Quantified Self Europe 2013, Amsterdam

I’ve just got back from a fabulous and thought provoking time at Quantified Self Europe 2013 conference in Amsterdam. It was great to return for the second QS conference (I blogged the first one here) and also to have the opportunity to speak again about wearable technology. This time, as well as a short intro to wearable tech, I spoke about some of my own projects that visualise data from sensors worn around the body, such as my Heart Spark proximity / heart rate hack, temperature sensing t-shirt, barometric skirt and EEG pendant (which I need to blog). I took tons of notes and photos whist at QSEU13, but for now I’m going to just leave my slides here as I’m about to go to uni for end of year progress review (yikes!).

Visualising Physiological Data – Quantified Self Europe 2013 from Rain Ashford

Introduction to Wearable Technology Workshop at Bridge Rectifier, Hebden Bridge

Last weekend I visited picturesque Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire to deliver a workshop on wearable technology and e-textiles, incorporating LilyPad Arduino Simple microcontroller boards, for the Bridge Rectifier Hackerspace Group, which was held in Hebden Bridge’s lovely Town Hall.

I started the day with a presentation on wearable technology, its background, some thoughts on the influence of Science Fiction, Makers and Hackers, and the effect of the miniaturisation of computing and communications technology on wearable technology, plus some examples of existing wearable technology and uses.

The workshop itself introduced the LilyPad Arduino microcontroller and Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment), as well as introductory coding and electronics concepts and terms. On the practical side, attendees used crocodile clips to put together a simple LED (Light Emitting Diode) circuit, followed by a more complex LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) circuit and experiment with code to play with threshold levels to turn a bi-colour LED from green to red.

After experimenting with code and watching the results in the serial monitor, attendees sketched out circuits and worked with conductive thread, fabrics and accessories on ideas for wearable electronics and e-textile projects that incorporated the circuits and code sketches explored earlier in the day.

I really enjoyed running the workshop and was very impressed by the enthusiasm and ideas from the attendees, who were roughly of a 50/50 gender mix, a broad range of ages and backgrounds. The wearable projects that evolved during the afternoon included: a colourful flashing Burlesque barrette, a green, sensing Cyclops for a t-shirt whose one eye changed from green to red, a prototype t-shirt for a local drumming band which incorporated sequenced flashing LEDs, a LilyPad turned into a flower featuring a blinking LED to feature on a hat, an LED glove and a t-shirt featuring a figurine with LED eyes and LEDs incorporated into its outfit, plus some experimental circuits with LDR and LEDs.

Many thanks to Andrew Back for inviting me and doing all the behind the scenes organising, Hebden Bridge Town Hall and DesignSpark for their support.

International Women’s Day 2013 at Tech City & QCon London

I had a fabulous & busy International Women’s Day on 8th March. Firstly in the morning I gave a talk on wearable technology at QCon London software conference, held at QEII conference centre. My talk was part of the Making – The Future track and followed a great talk on Physical Pi, which contained lots of great ideas of what you can do with your Raspberry Pi by Romilly Cocking and Steve Freeman of QuickWire

In my talk, Here Comes Wearable Technology, I took a brief look at how wearable technology has emerged from its early roots in cybernetics, sci-fi and clunky but cool electronics (feat the legendary Steve Mann several times) and how artists, designers and makers are developing wearables outside the current bubble of media hyperbole of speculation on Google Glass, Apple’s creations, etc. Plus showed some of my wearable electronics creations and a peek at some of the coding and electronics teaching I’d been doing via e-textiles with various groups of students at Aberystwyth University for Technocamps.

Here Comes Wearable Technology! from Rain Ashford

In the evening I hopped across town to Poke’s HQ in Shoreditch for Tech City International Women’s Day Showcase to show some of my wearable tech pieces such as my Baroesque barometric skirt, musical C scale and Twinkle Tartiflette t-shirts, cyclist warning proximity t-shirt and Mindwave Mobile EEG/brainwave visualising prototype!

The event featured an amazing bill of talented women technologists, such as Sarah Angliss, Emilie Giles, Leila Johnston, Pollie Barden and more, see the showcase page for full line up and links to their work!

Here’s a lovely video from the event, I apologise in advance for my doolallyness in the bits I feature – I was suffering from the effects of a horrid sinus head cold, which had reduced my brain’s processing to a wibbly mess!

Many thanks to the fab organisers of Tech City IWD: Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, Ana Bradley, Natasha Carolan, Becky Stewart, host Poke & their peeps, all the fab people who came along that I had brilliant conversations with, plus sponsors Redmonk.

Baroesque – Barometric Skirt

I wanted to bridge the gap between what for me had been an enclosed capsule of capturing / visualizing my own physiological data and entwining it with data from the environment around me. The barometric skirt visualises data from four sensors, three of them are environmental: temperature, pressure and altitude, the forth is a temperature sensor that sits on the inside of the skirt and pulls in my body temperature. I’m interested in how I can display my physical data alongside that of the ‘bigger picture’ of elements that I am surrounded by.

If you haven’t seen or heard of a barometric sensor board before, it’s a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and the BMP085 I’ve used integrates temperature, atmospheric pressure and altitude sensors, these together constitute a suite of sensors that can be used for looking at weather data. You may have heard of ‘pressure’ attributed to weather terms such as high or low pressure – high pressure generally relates to warm, sunny weather and low pressure colder, wetter weather. Sensors in a barometric board are also used in altimetry to measure one’s present altitude, or for example, how high one has climbed.

I decided that I had to make a bespoke skirt for this project due to the way I wanted the RGB LED strip to display from inside the skirt. It took me a while to find a skirt pattern that I thought would suit the project, I’ve gone for an A-line skirt with a dropped waist, which I thought would support the components quite well, especially as RGB LED strip requires a 12 Volt supply, which isn’t exactly light! My initial idea was to make a jolly big pocket for the battery pack, but after spending a day experimenting with pocket making, I decided to make a Velcro on-and-offable components substrate apron (for want of a better term) which goes in the middle of the skirt fabric and lining layer, I made a fitted pocket on the substrate apron to hold the 12V battery pack.

The skirt required an illustration to enhance the component design and after pondering weather icons and scenes I decided that I wanted a Japanese feel and practiced fabric painting on with calligraphy brushes and tested various fabrics for holding paint, washability, shrinking and ironing capabilities. In the end I chose to create some Okami style weather designs inspired by the beautiful characters and fan art, so after making 2 or three prototype skirts in satin and organza (and being driven half mad by this task) I painted weather bound characters directly onto the skirt.

Having got the skirt (with the lining to shield the wearer from electronics components) mostly made, I moved on to the electronics. This took some of thinking about as I wanted to visualise data outputted from four sensors individually via RGB LED strip, the resulting rats nest took up three breadboards and contained so many components and wires it would have been a nightmare to reproduce and solder onto stripboard. Luckily a way to consolidate this somewhat came with the introduction of two array ICs. I added another temperature sensor to the circuit for measuring my own temperature and the whole lot was driven by a Shrimp kit instead of my usual choice of microcontroller board such as a LilyPad Arduino. “The Shrimp” as explained on the Shrimping It website is “a Arduino-compatible, handmade circuit you can use to create your own digital inventions” – basically it’s a low cost kit of components that you can put together yourself on breadboard or stripboard. This saved me a lot of space as I crammed all my components (bar the barometric sensor I wanted on the outside of the skirt and 12V battery pack) onto one piece of stripboard.

I’ve written the code, or sketch in C, with the inclusion of the Wiring library and the example code library for the BMP085 which does all the complex and clever calculations to convert readings to °C (Celcius), Pa (Pascal) and m (meter) readings. If you’ve got the barometric sensor set up using the Arduino IDE you can open the serial monitor to see the readings fly by.

I spent the next two weeks stripping wire and soldering, I also did a lot of desoldering and resoldering as I endeavoured to get the shrunken, but still a rats nest of wires in the correct groupings of PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) and digital input and output to their respective pins to match up with my code. I can’t underestimate the value of double checking wires and tracks before soldering, though it’s incredibly easy to make mistakes as wiring is always fiddly and tracks are so close together. Also, don’t forget to work out where your track cutting should be before squeezing everything into a small piece of stripboard – always leave an extra line or two in tracks for contingency! If you’re using a coin cell battery, it’s a good idea to get a small, solderable holder for it, but be selective in which type you choose as some are much more fiddly to release the battery than others! I should also mention that I couldn’t find a stripboard friendly version of a 2.1 barrel socket for the 12V battery pack, so I used an SMD one, but had to dig into the stripboard to join two track holes together. Another top tip is try to get a track in between your 12V and ground tracks, just in case of any stray solder bridging!

Before sewing the stripboard and RGB LED strip to the apron substrate, I added some strong Velcro to hold the apron to the skirt lining fabric, next time I do this style of embedded electronics I will use a stronger substrate for the electronics as lining fabric isn’t really robust enough for suspended 12V battery packs! Until I do a better photo shoot / video enjoy some the photos and video I’ve made along the way.

Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Jamillah Knowles – Tech Hurricane!

My Ada Lovelace Day post is a little late as I’m currently experiencing lurgied brainfuddle, so I’ll get on with it!

I’d like to give a big shout out to Jamillah Knowles: tech journalist, radio presenter, podcaster, blogger and student of AI, whom you might also know under her nom de plume as Jemimah Knight. Jamillah is a contender for the hardest working person on the planet. When we both worked at the BBC I could rarely drag her away from her desk / studio for a conflab & chips and since she’s moved on to work for The Next Web as their UK Editor she’s just as busy, maybe busier, as there’s lots of extra travel on top to report from far flung conferences and events.

Not content with just doing the aforementioned day job, Jamillah still manages to fit in her joyous weekly reportage on leftfield geek podcast, BBC Outriders, plus is a contributor to Global Voices Online and then somehow manages to fit in study for her BSc in artificial intelligence and human machine interaction, where JavaScript jousting is a sport for the fearless. I don’t know how she fits it all in and possibly does her sleeping whilst baking zeros and ones in the Knight Patisserie. Anyways, be thoroughly impressed! Top tip – don’t get in her way

OSHcamp (Open Source Hardware Camp) 2012, Hebden Bridge

I had an awesome time at OSHcamp 2012 (Open Source Hardware Camp) held in scenic Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, last weekend. Organised by Andrew Back of SolderPad and OSHUG, the weekend was an intense and fascinating Saturday of talks, followed by in-depth workshops on Sunday. OSHcamp is the second annual meet up spawned from the successful OSHUG – Open Source Hardware User Group show and tell meets usually staged around London.

Here is a brief overview of the talks and workshops over the weekend:

Jeremy Bennett was our welcoming MC for the Saturday presentations that kicked off with an introduction to The Internet of Things by Adrian McEwan, which included various example projects, thoughts on what makes now a good time for the IoT to evolve – such as the propensity of cheap components and small computers. Adrian also explored a few clichés that have surrounded IoT.

Second up was Paul Tanner, who spoke about Practical Experiences with the Google Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) and how one can create projects that use Arduino microcontrollers with Android phones. He showed how the Android and Arduino compare and can compliment each other, plus gave project examples of this.

Melanie Rhianna Lewis gave an introduction to Developing Linux on Embedded Devices by defining what this is and showing us some examples. Raspberry Pi is one example of an embedded device that uses Linux as, for example, it fulfills the criteria of being physically small, has limited resources compared to desktop computers and interfaces with non-regular hardware. Melanie’s talk went on to show more examples, development processes and tools. Her presentation can be found here.

Interfacing the Raspberry Pi to the World — Everything you need to know about Pi – was the exciting title of Omer Kilic’s presentation which explained how owners of the Raspberry Pi can get their device to communicate with the outside world using GPIO (General Pin Input / Output). His talk also included a cautionary image of a burnt Pi, which I wish I’d caught with my camera, a timely reminder to ensure you power your device correctly! Omer’s talk covered topics featured in his excellent Raspberry Pi workshop that he gave on Sunday.

I gave a talk on Wearable Technology (+ a bit of open sourcery), which started with a very quick intro into the evolution of wearable tech, how Maker and Hacker culture is making a significant contribution to this and also changing tech business models. I showed a few examples of my work that incorporates LilyPad Arduino sewable microcontroller and ended with a look at how wearable technology and e-textiles is a great vehicle for getting school-age children interested in electronics and coding. Below are my slides.

Wearable Technology (+ a bit of Open Sourcery) from Rain Ashford

We then broke for lunch and I was extremely pleased that a large vegan platter full of tasty tidbits had been procured; which had gone down so well with the other delegates I was urged to break off from chatting to go and grab some before it had all been eaten up!

For the afternoon session, first up was Tim Panton on Running OpenBTS in the Real World. OpenBTS is a software-based GSM access point, allowing standard GSM-compatible mobile phones to make calls without having to use existing telecommunication providers’ networks. Tom spoke about his adventures setting up an OpenBTS (Open Base Transceiver Station) network recently at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, where the need for getting messages home to loved ones often proved to have a heartfelt story behind it.

Edward Strickland spoke about the issues surrounding Developing a Heavy Lift UAV — Pitfalls, Problems and Opportunities. Demonstrating his own build of an UAV (Unmanned Ariel Vehicle). He reported how they are very useful for carrying out dangerous and dull airborne tasks. Edward talked us through various challenges, such as developing for carrying heavy payloads over distance, take-off and landing methods both conventional and vertical, plus cost, weight and efficiency of heavy engines and gearboxes.

Mark Gilbert was up after tea break and gave an interesting insight into the world of The 3D Printed Revolution. He took us through the development of his Fable clock, which is manufactured to order using Selective Laser Sintering, which is much more cost effective than manufacture by mass injection moulding as these bespoke clocks only sell in small quantities.

Alan Wood spun us a cautionary tale: The Bots are Coming, about the dangerous and subtle growing army of bots that are easily available to procure and are propagating via 3D printers. He sent a chill around the hall and many felt the wind of fear up their underkecks.

To finish, Hwa Young Jung gave us an introduction to the DIYBIOMCR group at Manchester’s MadLab, featuring how to extract your own DNA using ingredients very similar a pina colada cocktail and examples of existing bio hacks such as the spider goat.

After tidying up the hall, we all headed off to the pub for food and to carry on conversations.

Sunday featured several workshops running concurrently, I attended Omer Kilic & Melanie Rhianna Lewis’ great Raspberry Pi workshop, which used General Pin Input / Output to interface the Pi with components. I spent far too much time being sociable to accomplish all the examples Omer had put together, but I was happy with a blinking LED on a breadboard using a simple C script.

Other workshops included:

• Practical 3D Printing with RepRaps.by Alan Wood, Mark Gilbert & Mike Beardmore
• Building GSM Networks with Open Source – looking at the practical steps involved in creating a low power GSM network using open source technology by Tim Panton & Andrew Back
• Practical IoT Applications with the Google ADK and Arduino – a hands on IoT building sessions that follow on from Saturday’s ADK and Arduino talks by Paul Tanner & Adrian McEwen

An excellent time was had by all: much knowledge was exchanged, old friends reunited and new friendships forged. We even had our own OSHcamp cat, Kipper in attendance Many thanks to Andrew Back and all the organisers, speakers and helpers, plus thanks to the sponsors, esp. SKPang and Oomlout for the lovely conference badges and the fab goodie-bags.

Welsh Dragon e-textile coding & electronics workshops for Technocamps

On the 8th July I returned to Aberystwyth with Sophie McDonald to spend 10 days teaching workshops on simple coding and electronics concepts using C programming language and sewable electronics covering for example: parallel / series circuits, switches, how to avoid short circuits, sensors, actuators and an overview of the LilyPad Arduino, for Technocamps.

This was a shorter and more compact experience compared to the 3-day bootcamp we taught during the Easter school holidays with young people from around Aberystwyth. The Easter bootcamp took students on a more in-depth journey through concepts around coding and electronics, where we had time to play with more circuit and code examples using breadboards, and spent an afternoon sewing electronic components into the students’ self-designed circuits – which you can read about here.

The workshops we prepared for this visit were shorter, 3-hour workshops and we presented them to school students, drop-in Technoclub students and home-schoolers of various ages from 8-15 years old. It still included an introduction to wearable technology and covered examples such as Steve Mann’s work in wearable augmented reality that has spanned several decades and I feel charts the miniturisation of technology (in a wearable) over time very well.

The new workshops concentrated more on getting immediate results from coding and electronics, so we pre-sewed the e-textiles side of things before the workshops, which visually took the form of the Welsh Dragon from the flag of Wales, also known as Y Draig Goch (The Red Dragon). The Dragon image was ironed on to tea-towels and then Sophie and I spent over a week sewing the components on so they were all ready to plug into computers upload code and for the students to enjoy experimenting with!

The Red Dragons contained the following components connected via sewn conductive thread: a LilyPad Arduino microcontroller, a LDR (Light Dependent Resistor), parallel LED circuit and fabric switches. Between these components you could do various exercises with various bits of code and combinations of components, so for example with the LDR the students were encouraged to look at the data coming back from the sensor in the serial monitor and change the code accordingly to use the LDR as a light sensitive switch to turn an LED on and off. We also used crocodile clips directly with the LilyPad Arduino, using a resistor and an LED to demonstrate circuits, resistors acting as dam to the flow of electricity, power + to ground -, anode and cathode.

For each class we lead over the 10 days we made small adjustments to the lessons in terms of age and knowledge, plus we played around with the scheduling and timing of the class to try and improve the flow where we felt necessary. We also enquired from accompanying teachers whether the students had already experienced some coding or electronics lessons at school or in the form of after school clubs. Some were familiar with coding and Arduino because they’d sought out to learn these areas themselves or been to a previous Technocamps workshop and it was really inspiring for the other students when these experienced kids chipped in with answers and suggestions in the classes.

Apart from visiting schools and schools coming to Aberystwyth University’s Computer Science Department for workshops from the local area, we also took part in a drop-in Saturday in the Physics Dept, where any youngsters could come along and learn about coding, electronics and robots, plus we ran a workshop for home-schoolers, where the mums stayed and also learned some coding and electronics. I was really impressed by the way the mums threw themselves into getting involved in what the children were being taught. I hope the mums took away that coding and electronics projects aren’t too hard to get up and running, had fun getting involved at the workshop and will carry on learning at home.

We ended the lessons, where there was time, with a short exercise for the students in drawing their own circuits based on ideas they had for pieces of wearable technology, the ideas that were generated were very inspired and the students enjoyed a show and tell of ideas at the end of the workshop.

Our time at Aberystwyth also coincided with iOSDev conference at the university and about 20 conference delegates came to an impromptu demonstration we gave of the Dragons and asked us interesting questions. We also had some cool guest speakers for some of our workshops, we had a talk on the World Wide Web by Roger Boyle, My Life as a Software Engineer by Jonathan Roscoe, a talk about the European Parliament, from MEP for Wales, Derek Vaughan and last but certainly not least a visit from the Welsh Dalek and K9 courtesy of Steve Fearn of the Institute of Maths and Physics at Aberystwyth University.

In conclusion, we found the workshops very rewarding and the students genuinely seemed to get a lot out of them. With the circuits already sewn together by Sophie and I, a lot of time was saved and we packed in the maximum amount of examples and experiments within the three-hour workshops. I feel that all the sewing, slides and preparation that we did upfront and continually reviewed for each new session paid off really well for different age groups, class sizes and types of student. We found we zipped through some parts of the workshops where a few of the students had prior knowledge of coding, electronics or microcontrollers. Plus the students with a little knowledge were able impress their friends and were also eager to help out anyone who needed a bit of extra help or instructions repeating. Classes where students had no prior experience went really well too and to time, as students became confident really quickly with code and electronics when they realised they could get instant results from the electronic components by making adjustments to the code and uploading it to the LilyPad Arduino.

Letting the students experiment and make mistakes in the code to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of learning functions and formatting really helped them get a feel for putting code and electronics together. The circuit drawing session at the end of the workshop got the students thinking about how they could apply what they had learned to personal garments and also how they could be ambitious and stretch their knowledge and experiments.