Exploring e-textile Toolkits: LilyPad, Flora, Circuit Playground, and More

In this chapter, you’ll learn about e-textile toolkits. You will start by learning about the toolkits available, as well as some sewable components you can use.

We will begin by exploring LilyPad components and how we can connect them. Then, we will learn about Flora, Gemma, Circuit Playground, and other e-textile toolkits. We will also examine the differences and why you may choose one board over another.

Once you have a grasp of these toolkits and boards, as well as their capabilities, we can make electronic circuits. This will lead to using the Arduino IDE to program interactive elements into your designs. We will finish by setting up the software that will be needed throughout this book.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand what e-textile toolkits are, and how we can use them to start creating and learning about wearables. You’ll be able to choose an e-textile board...

Technical requirements

This chapter has a practical element where you will experiment with circuits. You will need the LilyTwinkle ProtoSnap Kit for the circuits. It contains the following items, which you may choose to swap out or purchase separately:

• The LilyTwinkle board
• A sewable coin cell battery holder (switched or not)
• A coin cell battery
• Sewable LEDs
• Stainless steel conductive thread
• Sewing needles

For the last activity, we will use a Circuit Playground board, the Gemma M0 board, and the Arduino IDE, which is available for free at https://www.arduino.cc/en/software.

LilyPad e-textiles

The LilyPad boards were the most widely known and were developed for creating wearable circuits. However, as we’ll learn, there are a variety of microcontroller boards to suit our projects. Many are based on the Arduino board with ATMEL chips. Therefore, we can use the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) to program them. Learning about the different types of e-textile kits will help you with planning and making future wearable circuits.

A microcontroller is a small single-purpose computer with an integrated circuit (IC) that’s made up of a processor, memory, and connections for inputs and outputs. It will store and run a program that we upload to it. Most of the boards have a reset button and a way to connect power to it.

A key feature of e-textile toolkits is that they all can be integrated into our wearable designs easier than traditional microcontroller boards.

The LilyPad Arduino was one of the first commercially available...

Understanding Flora, Gemma, and Circuit Playground

In this section, we will look at the exciting choices we have for creating wearable designs with circuit boards designed specifically for this purpose. Here, we will look at Adafruit Industries in New York, founded by Limor Fried in 2005 (Ladyada) and certified as A Minority and Woman-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE). We will look at their sewable circuit boards, including Flora, Gemma, and Circuit Playground.

We’ll learn about the differences between these microcontroller boards. Then, we’ll explore a range of components that connect to our circuits to add interactivity. Finally, we will investigate other systems that you may want to learn about through your research.

We will cover the following topics:

• Adafruit Flora, Flora sensors, and snaps
• Gemma M0
• Circuit Playground Classic, Express, and Bluefruit
• Other toolkits

Let’s get started.

Flora, Flora sensors, and snaps

Let...

Comparisons and observations

These comparisons and observations are largely from my experiences with using different systems across a variety of projects. It also comes from reading a lot of research projects and developmental workshop information, to learn about other people’s perspectives and uses for these boards.

The LilyPad boards are usually purple and have a petal-style design. The Flora has larger sew tabs so that you can easily use your crocodile clips on them. In addition, the board is black, which I like for my circuits. The Gemma M0 is also black, and the size makes it a great fit for hiding in clothing easily.

You may want to consider choosing a board that has a lot of support and resource materials. Some boards have extensive libraries, for example, and great documentation. Also, I have found some boards difficult to source. From researching these boards, it looks like the LilyPad Arduino USB Plus will be the LilyPad board to support. Some of their other...

Software setup and resources

Looking back at the simple LED circuits we’ve been discussing, they are good for understanding how an electronic circuit works. If we only ever wanted a simple LED to turn on or off, then we’d be done. But we’re here to do something a lot more fun. Using a microcontroller will add interactivity – and life – to our wearables!

Let’s set up the software that we’ll use for all our circuits in this book and beyond. We’ll be using the Gemma M0 and Circuit Playground boards for many of the wearable designs. As mentioned previously, the Gemma M0 is a small-sized board that is great for wearables because of its size. It has enough sew tabs for input and output. The Circuit Playground board has a larger number of possible connections, so we can use it for more complex circuits. It also has a lot of sensors on the board so that we can use it without connecting anything as we get started. So, with these boards...

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, we get error messages. The one you might see after trying to upload code is Cannot run program "{runtime.tools.arm-none-eabi-gcc.path}\bin\arm-non-eabi-g++". This likely means that you are missing an important installation, in which case you must ensure that the Arduino SAMD boards package has been installed on your system. It is important to have both the Arduino and Adafruit SAMD board packages installed.

To fix this, you can navigate to the Tools | Board | Boards Manager menu, as shown in the following screenshot, but you can also click on the second icon down on the left-hand side of the program.

Figure 3.28 – Accessing Boards Manager

The second, quicker way to access the Boards Manager window is using the left-hand side menu. The icon that looks like a circuit board (highlighted in the following screenshot) opens Boards Manager too. This icon will open a side panel, as shown in the following screenshot,...

Summary

This chapter explored the e-textile boards and kits that we can use to get up and running with our wearable circuits. We explored their differences and uses and how you can make decisions about which board will be a perfect fit for your projects. The Gemma M0 board is a great little board to start a project with due to its size and affordability, and the Flora gives us a few more options to add more interactivity to our wearables.

The Circuit Playground range of boards offers huge interaction possibilities in our projects due to their huge feature sets. At the time of writing, there isn’t a more comprehensive board on the market. We also learned about the LilyPad range of components, which allows us to add sewable sensors easily. The pre-programmed boards allow us to create fun circuits that only require sewing. Then, we learned about the LilyPad boards with I/O pins, which can be useful for expanding the projects we create.

We finished by installing the Arduino...

Review questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter:

1. What types of sensors are available with the e-textile toolkits?
2. How do these kits help us design our wearables?
3. Why do we need input and output pins?
4. What is the difference between digital and analog pins?
5. What are the first three things we need to check when using the Arduino IDE?
6. What is the purpose of the void setup() function?