As part of the Digital Futures UKMX, a series of maker events between the UK and Mexico, this last weekend saw Mexican artists and technologists come to London’s V&A for the museum’s Digital Design Weekend. A collaboration with the British Council, it was part of the London Design Festival and showcased design-led solutions to contemporary issues and problems.
Back in June, designers, artists, the public, and engineers undertook a 48 hour live-linked maker marathon between Dundee, named last year as the UK’s first UNESCO City of Design, and Mexico City for a collaborative prototyping session. On the one hand you had Mexico City, a megacity of 22 million, and on the other you had Dundee, a Scottish city with only 149,000 residents. The ideas born from this juxtaposition in these heady two days were displayed at the V&A, where members of the public got to interact with them.
One of the prototypes on show was by Octavio A. Martinez García, a robotic engineer who works in the field of mechatronics at COCOLAB. Aimed at helping the sleep deprived get some restful shut-eye, his piece is an electronic sleep mask called Napz—for the wearer it not only helps with a good night’s rest but helped induce a state of lucid dreams, too, a type of of sleep where you’re able to control the actions in your dreams. The piece is made from infrared sensors, Neo Pixels, and the Arduino Lilypad.
“The prototype is an eye mask designed to measure REM, using LED lights to gently stimulate you and bring you to the border of consciousness and unconsciousness so you can begin to play with your dreams,” explains García. “Today people get a lot less sleep, and of a much worse quality. Napz is a wearable device intended to schedule lucid dreams and thus produce actual rest and better patterns of REM sleep. Its interface allows the programming, design, and analysis of dreams. As everybody is different the device needs to be calibrated to each individual. The inspiration came from my own experience of lucid dreaming.”
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Select Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: PyCon AU 2024 Talks, New Raspberry Pi Gear Available and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!