Last week I heard my application to be part of The Library of Lost Books project had been accepted.
The project aims to take old, discarded books from the Birmingham Library and rework them to create an exhibition of books for the opening of the new Library of Birmingham in 2013.
Here’s a how-to for setting up the Arduino software to start coding for LilyPad projects. This is taken from a LilyPad Arduino project I created; I thought it might be useful to have this software guide as a separate post from the projects.
This guide is for Mac OS X, but should give a general intro for Windows & Linux too.
This project is to create a bedside light that can switched on or off by moving a book. It uses an accelerometer sewn into the book to measure the book’s movement.
When the book lies flat, the LED lights are off. When the book is tipped up above a 20 degree angle in any direction, the lights fade up to full. To keep the lights on, stand the book upright, or prop up on an angle. To turn the lights off, lie the book flat.
This project uses a temperature sensor and five LEDs sewn into a wrist warmer to respond to ambient temperature.
If the temperature drops below 12°C, the lights start fading in and out. If the temperature is 1°C or below, the lights twinkle.
This guide is written for Mac OS X.
(tl;dr: Wrist warmers are practical warming devices, they can also tell you when it’s cold enough to wear them, through the application of pretty twinkling lights.)
The project I’m working on currently uses a LilyPad Arduino – a programmable, wearable Arduino for clothing. It involves no soldering, but instead, sewing with conductive thread to complete circuits.
Here’s a collection of links I’ve found useful for getting started.
