Mountain Safety Jacket: Movement Sensitive LED Jacket #WearableWednesday
If you have ever gotten turned around in the woods you know situations can go from exciting to terrifying in moments. This project uses a bunch of Adafruit gear to create a jacket that lights up and is motion responsive.
Improvements in lightweight and wearable electronics are opening new possibilities for bringing technology into the backcountry and using it to increase the safety of those who explore. For this project, I drew on my own experiences with outdoor adventuring to imagine the future of my favorite outdoor clothing brands and increase wilderness safety without being GPS-enabled.
The Mountain Safety Jacket uses the Adafruit FLORA board to control FLORA Pixel LED strips embedded in the wrists and hood of a jacket. Like many headlamps, the wearer can toggle through several light settings to adjust the brightness and color of the LEDs. While the jacket is in use, a simple tilt switch senses whether or not the wearer is moving; after the wearer is motionless for 15 minutes, the circuit triggers the LEDs to flash endlessly, making the wearer more visible to rescuers. This flashing can only be deactivated by resetting the circuit using the FLORA board embedded on the back of the hood.
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!
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
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.
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!
