I was checking out some DIY electronics at a local Microcenter, dying to buy something (hardware hacking has started to consume my attention, lately). I saw some NeoPixel rings that reminded me of a Celebration Spectacles guide I had read on Adafruit. Then I saw on the store shelf an Adafruit kit for making steampunk-ish Kaleidescope Goggles, making me to want to build some form of LED glasses, which made sense, as New Year’s Eve was only a week or so away.
Putting all together
Interesting hardware and useful guides with code and wiring diagrams make it really easy to do your own hardware projects. I’m not surprised that my first wearable project was inspired by Adafruit. I had first heard of Adafruit many years ago specifically because they were making hardware to be sewn into clothing – true wearables.
I used the two Adafruit guides as my inspiration. Like in my kitchen, recipes are suggestions. I modified the Celebration Spectacles build and combined and tweaked the code from both guides to have the animations, sequencing, and timing I wished to have.
In the end, I used the two Neopixel rings (the most expensive parts!), a positively adorable Trinket M0 (more on that in future, for sure), a pair of specs from the dollar store, and a battery. I then soldered it all together, hotgluing the setup to the frames.
Pretty cool.
What I learned
This is so far the most physically complicated hardware project I have done due to the wire routing, hotglueing, and careful soldering needed. I had no problem prototyping the set up, or writing the code. Though I had to pay special attention to the assembly – soldering and glueing are sort of one-way activities in that they are a pain to reverse. To facilitate connecting the pieces and assembling the glasses, I made a paper template to mark out position of things and to measure and route wires. Being patient and checking things twice made the assembly go smoothly and efficiently – much faster than I expected.
With respect to the software, I had partially wanted to do the spectacles as an excuse to use the Trinket to do something with CircuitPython. Alas, the animations in CircuitPython were so much slower than the same animations in Arduino, so I kept with the Ardiuno IDE. I guess I’ll keep playing with CircuitPython on my Circuit Playground Bluefruit. But this was a good lesson in the difference in the capabilities between Arduino and CircuitPython.
Funny thing, though, just before I put the Trinket on the frame it seemed dead. It had some touchpad code that I had last played with and I could not get the board to connect to the Arduino IDE. I panicked, pressed the board’s reset button uselessly, until I read that if you pressed the reset button ‘twice’ the board would go into USB mode. Just like other CircuitPython boards. D’oh. How’d I not catch that before?
Last thought
I was able to assemble it all in time for New Year’s Eve, wearing it all that night and then the next day as I drove around and walked the dogs. Haha.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with the NeoPixels and the Trinket, so expect more in future. Indeed, I’ve been sharing wearable examples with my mom and she’s keen on me helping her with a project around pixels and microcontrollers on something she might sew or embroider.
Let’s see.
