Designing and Prototyping Your Own Hyper-Body System

What is a hyper-body system and how can we make one? We will focus on designing and building low-fidelity and proof-of-concept prototypes for your hyper-body system, using components and microcontrollers suitable for your fashion tech item. This chapter will help you to choose the appropriate components for your purpose and to test your circuits. These are essential skills for creating working wearables and fashion tech pieces.

In this chapter, you will be consolidating the knowledge you’ve acquired in previous chapters to create a wearable technology project that is ambitious and exciting. We will learn about hyper-body systems and how to design one. Then, we’ll do some project planning and jump into an ambitious wearable using the Internet of Things (IoT).

By the end of this chapter, you will have completed a project that can be controlled by friends or family through the internet, and you will have your circuit...

Technical requirements

This chapter is about learning how to make more use of the ESP32-based boards we looked at in the previous chapter. We will continue our journey using a small but capable board for our project in this chapter. We will need the following:

• Arduino software as the IDE and access to https://io.adafruit.com/.
• An Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 (you can use -S3 or the Feather HUZZAH from previous activities).
• NeoPixels of your choice, a heating pad, and a vibration motor.
• You will also need a 1N4001 diode, a 270 resistor, and a PN2222 transistor, breadboard, and hook-up wires.

What is a hyper-body system?

Connecting three or more of the five basic senses would be considered hyper-body. We connect senses and materials by enhancing these senses or substituting them. The basic human senses are considered to be touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Our body senses these and sends information to our brain to process the messages to help us perceive the world around us. Some sources consider some additional senses to be spatial awareness (proprioception and body awareness) and balance (equilibrioception) because we also couldn’t live without them. You may see these terms referred to slightly differently, such as the vestibular sense or movement. Acceleration, time, pain, temperature, and kinesthetic senses are also sometimes discussed. Humans are complicated systems!

Touch is considered important not only for survival, for example, knowing to not get burned by fire, but also for communication. Compassion from others that we can sense through touch...

How to design your hyper-body system – choosing materials, components, and purpose

We’ve completed several activities throughout the book and they have become increasingly complex. In this section, we’ll look at designing your own hyper-body system and what you should consider as part of your wearable design process.

The many forms our wearables can take include socks, vests, underwear, scarves, wristbands, gloves, hats, belts, jewelry, and near-body items such as purses, handbags, and backpacks. How will you choose the form for your project? Making decisions about how to protect or secure your circuitry for a wearable is an important factor to think through as part of your planning. In a hyper-body system, we may have sensors or outputs in several locations. This has an impact on their placement too.

As the complexities of our circuits increase, you may decide to move from the typical placement of components on top of the fabric to a more incorporated...

Building up your prototype – function by function

It’s finally time to get building. With our thoughts on planning done, there’s just a few reminders of some of the techniques we’ve been learning along the way.

Here are some top tips for a successful project:

• Try to build your projects in sections. This also gives you a sense of accomplishment when something works. I’ve had the experience of trying to do too much at once and then there seems to be an insurmountable number of errors to fix.
• Prototype small and in a non-permanent way. All I mean by this is when you start the circuit, try to use croc clips or breadboards, and hook up wires so that you can easily fix, move, repair, and try things out.
• Don’t forget to check your board and port every time you disconnect and connect the board to your computer and Arduino.
• It’s a good idea to prototype and test the connections as you finish them. This might be checking...

Connecting the QT Py to the internet

We’ve chosen to use the Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 board for a few reasons, such as its small form factor, the huge number of accessible pins, the ability to expand our circuits easily and quickly with STEMMA QT connections, but also because it is an internet-capable board. A STEMMA connection is a three- or four-pin JST PH connector that manufacturers have been putting on boards over the last few years to make connecting components quicker. The four-pin version is for I2C use.

We will create a way for our friends and families to send colorful feelings to us, or if we give the wearable to a loved one, for us to send colors to them. This will be done using an IoT service. To do this, we will have to follow a few steps to create and use an online service, https://io.adafruit.com/, to make a connection. There are other services available – however, this service has a lot of support and users, so it is a good place to start. Let’...

Troubleshooting

If you have any issues while connecting, then you might start by checking that you have altered the information correctly in the config.h file. Make sure you’ve got the username and the key copied exactly. Also, make sure you’ve got the correct Wi-Fi credentials.

To verify that you don’t have internet issues, you can alter the Serial.println(.); code to Serial.println(io.statusText()); – this will print to the serial monitor what the possible errors are:

// wait for a connection
while(io.status() < AIO_CONNECTED) {
Serial.println(io.statusText());
delay(500);
}

Check for a network disconnect message, which indicates that there is an issue with the internet connection. For other messages, try searching for them and going to the forums for IO.

I also had difficulties with my board dropping out or not being found on the port and other similar issues. I found I had to close Arduino and then relaunch it. Version 2.0 of the IDE...

Summary

This has been another exciting chapter with a big learning curve – but so rewarding! I hope you find time to go back over some of the concepts and techniques and run through the project again, adding other data feeds or making a new dashboard. We looked at what a hyper-body system is and what the senses we can try to incorporate are. We looked at how to design, choose materials and components, and the importance of placement and planning. We then discussed building our projects up function by function – which we then put into practice. We started by adding the Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 board to Arduino, we added NeoPixels, then a heating pad, and then connected to an IoT service! It really was a busy chapter.

We’ve got the makings of an exciting wearable, and we will take our breadboarded work and turn it into a wearable garment in the next chapter as we learn techniques for how to sew and solder. This will bring our project to an exciting close and you...

References

Some of the information in this chapter mentioned projects or research from the following papers:

Singhal, S., Neustaedter, C., Ooi, Y. L., Antle, A. N., & Matkin, B. (2017, February). Flex-n-feel: The design and evaluation of emotive gloves for couples to support touch over distance. In the proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 98-110). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313736576_Flex-N-Feel_The_Design_and_Evaluation_of_Emotive_Gloves_for_Couples_to_Support_Touch_Over_Distance.

Gooch, D., & Watts, L. (2012). It’s neat to feel the heat: how can we hold hands at a distance?. In CHI’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1535-1540).

Mueller, F. F., Vetere, F., Gibbs, M. R., Kjeldskov, J., Pedell, S., & Howard, S. (2005, April). Hug over a distance. In CHI’05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1673-1676).

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Review questions

1. What are some of the alternative senses that are discussed?
2. What are some of the advantages of using clothing that already exists (how can we add wearables?)
3. Can you describe the importance of planning ideas and thoughts?
4. What are the two things we always need to check when we plug in our board and open Arduino?
5. What is the limit of the ESP32 S2 chip?
6. Why would we connect to a service such as io.adafruit?
7. What is a feed for?
8. Why do we have a Dashboard in io.Adafruit?