Open Softwear: Fashionable Prototyping and Wearable Computing Using the Arduino

This guide is suitable to support a full introductory wearable-technology project using Arduino. It gives an overview of the Arduino system as well as the key terms surrounding ‘making’ and ‘hacking’. After a brief review of basic electrical theory, a closer look at the inputs and outputs of a basic board, and of the Lilypad and Mini Arduino boards, is presented along with information about common components such as LEDs and LDRs. The Arduino environment is described, and a chapter then describes how to use it. A series of wearable projects are walked-through, along with the code required to make them work. Instructions are included to make soft buttons, play sounds, detect tilting, create a ‘digital zip’ and an ‘analog zip’. Instructions for each of the usual components, including motors and servo motors and thermistors, are offered with more unusual parts such as conductive thread and touch-sensor chips. The final part of the guide covers programming in detail. It describes the function of the two-part Arduino program (setup and loop), as well as data types and arithmetic, variables, commenting code, calibrating sensors, and how to use analog and digital pins. Serial communication with other devices and using the serial monitor is explained, covering all the fundamental knowledge required to dive into microprocessor control with Arduino. The guide was written by Tony Olsson, David Gaetano, Jonas Odhner and Samson Wiklund, and is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license