NYC Resistor

Andrew Schneider is a performance artist, body hacker, and inventor of Experimental Devices for Performance. His inventions are sublime while his performances are spellbinding. He recently lit up IgniteNYC  and the above video comes from the Wall Street Journal’s “Tech Dairy.” More information can be found on Andrew’s website.

Jack Bauer apparel for the modern Cyber Terrorist.

Don’t get caught wearing this in Boston, or on line for your next flight. But the latest in hacker apparel makes sinister use of the ageless dark art of LED matrices. Anyways I am bringing my jacket to defcon to announce to the world, that the gauntlet has been thrown down… who will be first to legitimately drop a Pants Status: Pwned.

In terms of Technical Details, the Jacket uses a MAX 6952 LED array driver and is being written to via SPI.. and a boarduino.

Play or Die

So here’s a quick preview of the LED Array Jacket. I’m pretty excited it’s managed to light. Currently I am redesigning the driver circuit and boarduino to work with non-solid core wiring and to be more elegant and clean. But I thought this might wet your appetites.

Click To Play

Here’s an mp4.

Nick got his lily pad to say hello world, which in microcontroller-speak means that he got an LED to blink on and off.

It was a bit tricky because the arduino code version 10 hadn’t come out yet, so he was working with the alpha code. After some poking around, the official version 10 code still isn’t out. Here’s the alpha version. - Link

After I get another two videos up, I’ll get us set up with an itunes channel. If someone wants to make a better intro and outro for these videos, go for it!

The above video is hosted at blip.tv which is my favorite place. - Link
There’s an audience at youtube so I slapped it there too. - Link

Ok, so there is a pretty cheap setup with a remote control car with a video transmitter and heads up display that looks pretty rad. - Link
They’re out of stock at stores, but over at Make: they’re giving some away. - Link

Mikey made this jumpsuit full of LEDs and he set it up so that he could take all the wires and electronics off. I like the style of the jumpsuit. I grew up taking auto shop in school and I had a jumpsuit that was really great and this makes me want a jumpsuit again!

My solution was to use four layers of velcro, and a rather comfy full body jumpsuit I had purchased from a nearby military surplus store.The hope being that I would wear this jumpsuit frequently and not be limited by the weather or type of event. Its actually worked just as well as I hoped. I am able to wash the suit (detaching the electronics). - Link

I just got my fancy new LilyPad Ardunios. I have a few ideas for fun projects I can make with them, but I think to start out with I am going to aim for a practical execution: Idea #1 A heated jacket with different levels of, well, heat. I’d probably have to use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to make the different heat levels, but I’ll figure that out later. Idea #2 A jacket with LED arrows that I can activate when I’m riding my bike at night, that way people behind me know which direction I am going to turn. Don’t steal that idea, patent pending.

UPDATE:  We just found out that the software to program the LilyPad is not available until October 10th from ardunio.cc

These guys made a punching bag out of homemade sensors. They took pieces of wire mesh and soldered them together with some foam in between to create pressure sensitive foam. It’s all hooked up to the Arduino in a matrix and they were nice enough to post the code, tutorials and Processing files needed to recreate this project. I don’t think I have the need, or the space for that matter, to build a pressure sensitive punching bag, but I could definitely use a concept like this on some wearable clothing hooked up to a LilyPad.

http://www.fluidforms.at/de/CassiusHow.php

October 11-13 next week is the 11th ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computers). This year it’s being held in Boston and they have some great tutorials scheduled including Building Soft Computers: 1. Materials, Techniques, and Tools. 2. Introduction to Designing Mobile Applications with On-body Sensing. 3. The Role of Design in Wearable Computing, and 4. Wearable Technologies for Persons with Autism Spectrum Conditions.

It seems like a really interesting conference with an impressive lineup of speakers, workshops and discusssions. I’m going to be in Boston around the same time giving a talk at SND so I might try and sneak over there and see what they are up to. Anyone planning on attending this?

http://iswc.net/

Hardware hacker, FBZ posted to hackaday about the lilypad. I dug around on the site and found this great tutorial for getting started with it! As seen above is a color changing LED that changes when you move the embedded accelerometer around! - Link

Update: I’ve jotted down 7 ideas to play with when I get my ‘pad. - Link