We made cool af light-up shoes, just for the kicks!
This was a ProjX project done with Aditi Srinivasan during freshman spring (2017) at MIT. The shoes contain a resistive material in the sole that restricts current flow when pressure is applied. We used an Adafruit Flora to look for rapid changes in current (aka a step) in order to trigger a lighting event. Neopixels were superglued to the soles of the shoes.
FLORA – Wearable electronic platform: Arduino-compatible – v3: FLORA is Adafruit’s fully-featured wearable electronics platform. It’s a round, sewable, Arduino-compatible microcontroller designed to empower amazing wearables projects.FLORA comes with Adafruit’s support, tutorials and projects. Check out dozens of FLORA tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System, with more added all the time! Read more.
Pressure-Sensitive Conductive Sheet (Velostat/Linqstat): This conductive material (also known as “Velostat” or “Linqstat”) is a nice addition for your wearable/sensor hacking toolkit. It’s pressure-sensitive: squeezing it will reduce the resistance, so it’s handy for making flexible sensors. And it’s a lot less expensive than off-the-shelf pressure or bend sensors too! Each order comes with a 11″x11″ (28cm x 28cm) 4mil (0.1mm) thick piece. We may fold the sheet into quarters to ship it to you. To remove any hard creases, simply lay flat on a table and put a heavy book on top to flatten it out. Read more.
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!
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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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.