Wearable Hacks

825 Articles

PCB Manicure Wields Laser Cutter For Your Nails

February 18, 2015 by 30 Comments

Wearable electronics is a hot topic these days. Although these fancy talons are only for show, they could lead to more in the future.

[Shelby] and [Colleen AF] showed people how to include a laser cutter in your nail care at a recent event at NYC Resistor. The technique used here starts off with a base coat of the background color before heading to the laser cutter. Now don’t worry, you don’t need to risk any of your digits. A type of reverse silk screen is made with the laser by deeply etching the artwork into a piece of flat acrylic sheet. Those voids are then filled with the secondary color for the circuit traces and the excess is removed with a squeegee. A sponge is then used to transfer the paint from the recesses in the acrylic to the nails.

Granted, PCB finger nails might not be your cup of tea, but it does make us wonder: What if conductive ink was used? Would it be possible to build a circuit on your own fingernail? Obviously you would want to use a sticky, conductive glue rather than solder. (Please don’t try to reflow solder your fingers at home.) What kind of power supply would fit? What could you build? We also see other possible applications of the process like labeling non-flat surfaces. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

UPDATE: [David Flint] points out in the comments that this is a type of offset gravure printing.

GPS Clock Hat

Hat-Mounted Clock Requires Mirror For Wearer To Tell Time

February 14, 2015 by 13 Comments

[gfish] was planning on attending Burning Man and wanted to make something unique (and useful) to wear. He decided on a hat/clock hybrid. Just slapping a clock on a hat would be too easy, though. [gfish] wanted his hat to change time zones both via manual switches or physical location.

On the front of the hat there are 2 hands, as most clocks have. Each one is attached to one of two concentric shafts that run to the back of the hat. Each hand is individually controlled by an RC vehicle servo. Those of you familiar with RC servos know that a servos’ max rotation is about 180 degrees and is certainly not enough for a full revolution required by the clock. To fix this, there is a 3:1 gear set that allows a 120 degree rotation of the servo to move the clock hand a full 360 degrees. With this method, each hand can’t move past 12 and instead has to quickly move counter-clockwise to get where it needs to be in order to again start its journey around the clock face.

Mounted inside the hat there is an Arduino that controls the clock, a GPS shield to determine location and an RTC to maintain accurate time. Mounted on the side of the hat is a control panel that contains an overall on/off switch as well as a rotary switch for selecting a specific timezone or for engaging GPS mode. The whole thing is powered by a 9 volt battery.

If you like unnecessarily complicated top hats, check out this WiFi enabled message displaying one.

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A Haptic Bracelet For Physical Computing

February 12, 2015 by 9 Comments

[Tinkermax] has been reading about the Internet of Things and wearable computing and decided it was time for him to have a go at building a device that turned computing physical. The result is a vibrating wristband that connects his sense of touch to the Internet.

The electronics for this haptic wristband are a mix of old and new technology. The radio and microcontroller come from an ESP-8266 module that was programmed with [Mikhail Grigorev]’s unofficial SDK. The mechanics for the wrist-mounted computer consist of six pager motors mounted around the wrist. These are driven somewhat ingeniously by a TLC5917 LED driver chip. This meant the ESP would only need to use two of its GPIOs to control six motors.

Right now the software is simple enough; just a web page, a few buttons, and the ability to buzz any of the pager motors on the wrist band over the Internet. Now it’s just a question of making this wearable useful, but connecting each pager motor to different notifications – a new email, a new SMS, or some emergency on the Internet – should be pretty easy.

Video below.

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Self-Charging Jacket Eliminates Forgetfulness

February 3, 2015 by 23 Comments

Certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere are very, very cold right now. For those of us living in these colder climates, [Aaron] has a simple yet effective hack for keeping your hands warm when you go out for a walk in the brisk cold. He’s wired his jacket up for USB charging so he can make sure his hand warmers are always working.

[Aaron] bought a set of handwarmers that conveniently charge over USB, but he always forgot to actually plug them in once he got home, ensuring that they were always dead. To make his forgetfulness a non-issue, he built the USB charger for the handwarmers into his jacket, but he didn’t just run a wire out of the pocket. The USB charging circuit runs through the coat hanger, using some conductive cloth and steel thread in the inside of the jacket’s shoulders. From there, the cloth makes contact with the metal arms of the hanger and runs out of the hanger to the wall outlet.

This is a great cold-weather hack that might help any forgetful people on the north side of the planet keep warm. You could even use this method to charge batteries used in other wearable electronics. This project is a great reminder that sometimes the best hacks are the simple ones that no one’s thought of yet!

Hacking The Nike+ Fuelband

January 30, 2015 by 16 Comments

[Simone] was trying to reverse-engineer the Bluetooth protocol of his Nike+ Fuelband and made some surprising discoveries. [Simone] found that the authentication system of the Fuelband can be easily bypassed and discovered that some low-level functions (such as arbitrarily reading and writing to memory) are completely exposed to the end user or anyone else who hacks past the authentication process.

[Simone] started with the official Nike app for the Fuelband. He converted the APK to a JAR and then used JD-Gui to read the Java source code of the app. After reading through the source, he discovered that the authentication method was completely ineffective. The authenticator requires the connecting device to know both a pin code and a nonce, but in reality the authentication algorithm just checks for a hard-coded token of 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff rendering the whole authentication process ineffective.

After he authenticated with the Fuelband, [Simone] started trying various commands to see what he could control over the Bluetooth interface. He discovered that he could send the device into bootloader mode, configure the RTC, and even read/write the first 65k of memory over the Bluetooth interface–not something you typically want to expose, especially with a broken authentication mechanism. If you want to try the exploit yourself, [Simone] wrote an Android app which he posted up on GitHub.

Making Mittens For A Smartphone

January 23, 2015 by 32 Comments

For those of us in the slightly inhospitable parts of the northern hemisphere, it’s freaking cold outside. Spring can’t come sooner, and smartphones won’t work if you’re wearing normal gloves. Smartphones will work if you sew a few bits of conductive thread into your gloves, but if you prefer mittens, you’re out of luck. That’s alright, because [Becky] at Adafruit has great guide for knitting your own smart phone mittens.

Intellectually, the concept of weaving fabric is fairly simple – it’s just interlaced threads that form a flexible sheet. Sewing, too, is fairly straightforward. Knitting, on the other hand, is weird. It’s a single string tied to itself that forms a 3D shell. If you’ve ever picked up a pair of knitting needles, you’ll soon realize whoever invented knitting is perhaps the greatest forgotten genius in all of human history. Lucky, then, that [Becky] has a lot of links that go through how to knit, and how to turn yarn into a pair of mittens with this pattern.

To make these mittens work with a smartphone, [Becky] is using a stainless conductive yarn stitched into the thumb and fingertips of the mitten. It works, and now you can use your touchscreen device no matter how cold it is.

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Laugh Track Jacket Is Actually A Blazer

January 18, 2015 by 10 Comments

Picture it: your first open mic night at Larry’s Laugh Lounge. You’re up second in the lineup. It’s better than going first, but the crowd is far from hitting the two-drink minimum and your dad jokes are going over like a lead balloon. What now? Time for your secret weapon. You throw out the ‘tough crowd’ line while casually reaching into a pocket of your herringbone blazer. You press a button and the sound of crickets reaches the microphone. Someone chortles near the back. You smile, and remembering that Barbie joke from Reddit, your act takes a turn for the profane and the sweet sound of your first real laugh is forever burned in your memory.

This laugh track jacket from Adafruit’s [Becky Stern] is based on their own audio FX board, a standalone unit that can store and play WAV and OGG files. The board is also available with 16MB of flash for extended pre-recorded Foley artistry. This is an easy solder-and-sew project with a lot of wearable applications, and all of the components are available in the Adafruit store. There are plenty of places to get free sound effects that are already in WAV format, as the board does not support MP3s. As always, [Becky] has provided a clear and thorough guide with plenty of pictures and an introduction video that you can see after the break.

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