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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Although I got up early for the infamous scramble to bagsy one of the first Raspberry Pi available back in February, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones so had a rather long wait and was really excited when mine was finally delivered in July by the postman some months after many of my pals got theirs.

Below is a quick overview of how I got my Raspberry Pi up and running, you’ll notice straight away, this is different from playing with an Arduino or mbed as you’ll need to upload an operating system, as the Raspberry Pi is a small computer on a board and not a microcontroller which will run a single sketch. It doesn’t come pre-loaded with any software, so I’ve used Raspbian ‘wheezy’, a version of Debian Linux OS for my Pi.

If you’re just starting out with programming and the Raspberry Pi, you might find the links at the bottom of this page useful for more thorough information on how to set up and what to do with your Pi.

Getting started kit list:

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t come with anything and I forgot to order a bespoke power cable, but luckily my HTC phone’s power cable has the right micro USB to plug into its power socket. You shouldn’t power it from your computer as the current it draws is a bit too high for across USB! Other cables I used were a HDMI cable (you could use composite video, but either depends on your monitor), ethernet cable, USB keyboard, USB mouse, headphone jack for sound and finally I needed an SD card that I’d backed up and didn’t mind blatting all the content off and reformatting.

What I did to get Raspbian image onto an SD card via my Mac:

1. Download Raspbian from http://www.raspbian.org/ and unzip
2. Insert SD card into my Mac and open Terminal (command line interface)
3. Overwrite the FAT32 file system on SD card by doing the following…
4. Find the image in downloads by typing the following into Terminal
‘cd Downloads’ (hit return)
5. Then… ‘ls *.img’ (hit return)
6. Type ‘mount’ (hit return) to see where the SD card has mounted
7. Then ‘diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1’ or wherever your disk 1 (which is your SD card) turned out to be when you typed ‘mount’
8. Write image to disk ‘sudo dd if=2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=32768’ – this may take a while
9. Eject SD card

Loading Raspbian OS onto Raspberry Pi:

1. Pop SD card into Raspberry Pi and have a monitor plugged into it via HDMI or composite video, plus a USB keyboard and mouse to input to the Pi once the Raspi-config screen comes up and anything else such as Ethernet & I used my HTC charger for power as it has a micro usb on one end.
2. After a short while of loading you’ll be asked for a login which (at the moment) is login: pi and password: raspberry
3. When the Raspberry Pi has finished loading a screen of options will be left on screen – I selected expand root partition, as you need this to store more stuff on it – it will say on the next screen that it’ll implement this selection next time the Pi is booted
4. When one goes back to the Raspi-config screen, you may or may not want to set your keyboard – I set mine acordingly to Happy Hacker
5. Set locale & time zone – this is optional
6. I set boot_behaviour so it starts the desktop on boot
7. Tab to finish, I was done for now and so rebooted
8. I expanded the root partition, so had to wait a little while on reboot for it to do this!

HDMI above ^^^ vs. composite video below vvv

If this has all worked okay, when you reboot you’ll have the Raspbian desktop and access to Midori browser which should work if you’ve got your ethernet cable plugged in and a few apps such as Scratch, a fun drag and drop app for programming for kids (big and small) and a Python programming compiler.

I’ve got XRoar Dragon (retro pooter) emulator running on mine and have been playing some old games such as Manic Miner and Frogger! I’ve also had Dragon Nyan Cat on my Pi.

Update! (5th Aug ’12)

Thought I’d post a screenshot of Terminal with the commands for getting the distro image on the SD card as I was having a look at Adafruit’s Occidentalis version of Raspbian ‘wheezy’ on my Raspberry Pi, which has some extra goodies such as support for Bonjour, I2C and hardware SPI, sshd on boot and ssh keygen.

Links for setting up your Raspberry Pi and things to do with it:

Instructions for SD card set up for various operating systems

Raspberry Pi Linux distro downloads

Raspberry Pi blog, with various projects

Adafruit’s Occidentalis version of Raspbian ‘wheezy’ distro

Smart phone apps and integration were a dominant feature of many presentations and products shown at January’s WT Conference held at Messe München, Germany. I also noted we saw quite a few examples of wearable technology by several companies and speakers presented in bracelet / band form factor, which made me wonder – is this going to be the most popular way of packaging wearable technology for the consumer market for the next couple of years?

A jam-packed day of presentations made it difficult to select my highlights, but my personal shortlist included Dr Paul Lukowicz’s keynote on ‘From Cyborgs to Smart Phones’ where he posed the question ‘So has the smart phone killed the wearable?’ he answered his own question by stating ‘no’ and that the smart phone has made the public ‘ripe for wearable systems’, such as sport and health apps for starters. He described how he thought wearable technology should be ‘ambient’ and be performing tasks in the background whilst the user gets on with their life. He concluded that it’s an exciting time for wearable technology because ‘the public accepts the need for it and so it has the potential to be huge’.

I definitely concur, with Paul that smart phones have made an excellent ‘in’ for the mainstream public to get into and used to integrating wearable technology into their lives. Also that ambient systems, for example monitoring one’s blood pressure or diary continually in the background and only alerting the wearer/user when they need to be informed is one of the biggest advantages of us being able to wear powerful, small computers.

David Icke talked about stretchable, conformal electronics on the human body and the challenges of rigid and brittle electronics that historically don’t bend and stretch, thus making it difficult to produce comfortable wearable technology that stretches and moves with the wearer’s body. He showed an example of stretchable epidermal electronics that could be used for sensing vitals signs, track the user’s voice, as well as having potential for gaming use. He summarised that electronics worn on and inside the body will revolutionise fitness and healthcare.

Less rigid and sharp electronics are definitely essential for making wearable electronics viable – plus they also need to be light and washable and the power management (batteries) aspect needs to be solved as soon as possible – it would be great if we were a bit further ahead with power harvesting technologies for the wearer.

Michaela Klinger discussed how to make the best of smart phone technologies in Telehealth, plus how necessary standards are for medical wearable technology, giving examples such as how the Continua Health Alliance aims to do this. She also made the point that technology for health needs to be secure and if you’re a company thinking of starting out in Telehealth you should be prepared for the most stringent testing via the Medical Device Directive.

For me the most interesting part of Micheala’s talk was around standards and directives, as you can imagine with all this blossoming technology for health, areas such as privacy and storage of data are of paramount importance – as well as secure systems so the technology itself can’t be hacked. Plus it’s obvious that we need stringent standards & guidelines for technology that regulates something as crucial to the wearer as an insulin pump or a pacemaker. There were three presentations in the afternoon about various approaches to tackling diabetes via wearable technology and it was very interesting so observe how their technology varied and what safeguards were built into them, plus the sustainability of the products and how comfortable they looked. It also seemed very prudent that with various systems being developed, some kind of interoperability was needed.

I enjoyed my trip to München, for WT Conference, there seemed to be a lot of convergence of ideas and great company from colleagues and friends I’d met at previous companies. Overall I came away still extremely excited about developments in wearable technology and 2012 is definitely the year that wearable technology will go mainstream. I’d definitely go again.

Since last December, Sophie McDonald (usually of Mz-TEK) and I have been plotting a 3-day wearable technology bootcamp with Emma Posey and Hannah Dee (who’s also blogged here) of Technocamps for 11-19 year-old students in Aberystwyth.

Technocamps is a £6 million project led by Swansea University in partnership with the Universities of Bangor, Aberystwyth and Glamorgan to inspire young people aged 11-19 to attend workshops on computing-based subject such as wearable technology, robotics, game development, animation, digital forensics and more. Their long-term goal is to encourage young people to pursue careers in an area that will drive economic growth in Wales, which I’m all up for helping with.

Sophie and I put together a 3-day wearable technology schedule introducing electronics via the LilyPad Arduino sewable microcontroller environment, plus coding via C programming language sketches, which drive the inputs and outputs of the LilyPad Arduino.

The three-day bootcamp attended by approximately twenty-one 11-14 year-olds, with Sophie, Hannah & myself leading and helping the students through the workshops. I did a kick-off presentation to introduce some existing projects and aspects regarding the broad range and applications of wearable technology – plus the notion of only being limited by one’s imagination! Also some info on the ease of availability of suitable components and the supportive nature of the Maker community, tutorial sites and forums for young creators interested in finding out more after the workshops.

Day One: of the workshops began with a look at the LilyPad Arduino microcontroller, followed by the Arduino programming IDE (Integrated Development Environment). We moved on to getting an LED (Light Emitting Diode) to light up and blink from the LilyPad with a bit of coding. In the afternoon we played around with series and parallel LEDs on a breadboard with some more playing with code. We were delighted to see some of the students having fun with up to 14 blinking LEDs on their circuits!

Day Two: looked at creating an LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) circuit that would light an LED, a little more challenging, but by the end of the day, all the students had a working circuit that they then tweaked to become a light switch – by noting the serial data and reflecting it in their code.

Day Three: we leapt straight into designing our circuits for sewing onto fabric with the LilyPad Arduino, the students worked out their own designs for circuits and components, plus coded them accordingly. We had some fabulous compositions and designs. When parents and guardians came to inspect the fruits of the three-day bootcamp at the end of the day, they all seemed very pleased with the results, plus we gave out some certificates.

I feel that the wearable technology workshops using the LilyPad Arduino are a fantastic introduction into electronics and coding for young people. All the students were amazingly enthusiastic and persevered to grasp concepts new to them, plus they were able to have fun and incorporate their own design input into circuits, plus modifying and playing with code.

The students were all very keen and were so engrossed in their work they genuinely didn’t want the workshops to finish. They took their work home with them, plus a sheet of helpful links to help them carry on their own. Hannah also set up a group for Arduino in Aberystwyth (I’ll find the link and add later).

Eighty percent of the students were girls and I’m pleased to say that any preconceived ideas that have been banded about in the past of electronics / coding being more suitable pursuits for boys did not ring true at all – all the girls took to both disciplines of electronics and coding like ducks to proverbial water and there was no difference in the support needed for boys vs. girls for these workshops. Also on the other foot, the boys took to sewing and textiles without batting an eyelid – also dismissing more stereotypes around gender.

To summarise, I feel that wearable technology via LilyPad Arduino is a great way for students and people, whatever age and background, to enjoy an introduction to electronics and coding. I feel what may have been missing or miss-interpreted in the past is the real need to have a reason or fun pursuit for participating and personalising in the pursuit of electronics and coding – once people have a project or reason to make something they’ll enjoy using, they’re off!

For me it was very rewarding three days of workshops all round, we have a few tweaks to make to the workshops and slides which we’re going to do as soon as we have our breath back. Technocamps as well as Sophie and I want to repeat the workshops, plus eventually share the slides via Creative Commons license.