Adafruit's Open-source Wearable Platform, Flora
ptorrone writes "Limor 'Ladyada' Fried's NYC based Open-source electronics studio, Adafruit, today announced their new open wearable platform called the FLORA (blog post & video). The FLORA is Arduino compatible as well as supporting a variety of sensors and add-on devices including: Bluetooth, GPS, 3-axis accelerometer, compass module, flex sensor, piezo, IR LED, push button, embroidered + capacitive keypad, OLED and more. The first round of hardware is in the hands of testers to create wearable projects."
Or you mean all over the testers.. :)
Resistance is futile.
Something wrong with your email address as linked above. Just sayin'
Or you could just buy a Raspberry Pi and a glue gun :)
Bow before me, for I am root.
Seems like a strange decision to use an Atmel chip when everyone is moving to Cortex M-3.
They've been hammering at this for years, and we have yet to see anything more than a jacket with buttons for your MP3 player enter the market.
What's the obsession?
Please help metamoderate.
This is your first step towards becoming an aug. Soon you'll be forced to save the human race from the very man who inveted this technology (and eat a lot of candy bars along the way.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I love anything that Limor Fried does. This may sound creepy, but she is like the perfect woman. I mean Christ, she names her cat MOSFET! How could you not admire that?
Silence is a state of mime.
I will qualify this. If you are a programmer used to an IDE, Arduino sucks. It wes made to allow painters, breadmakers and other artists to make embedded elements, and maybe for a non-programmer, it may be the only (and best) thing out there.
I tried this and dropped it fast. Instead I ended up using Code Composer Studio. It works like a charm for all TI's boards. Try out the 430 development system on sale for $4.30. Great IDE with in circuit debugging and all the other features you are used to, and you are up and running in no time.
Android is also a good choice, powerful, but a little different if you are used to C/C++ insted of Java. Not only for phones but a lot of other embedded devices as well.
BTW, You can get used Samsung Galaxy with a new battery for $100. It is an incredible embedded device, and if you want buy an Arduino device with even a small part of the features, you will pay many times this.
!GHz ARM, 16BG flash, dilsplay,WiFi, Cameras, Graphics engine, xyz accelerometers, maybe gyros. If you need USB master you have to get android 4.0 based device.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Saying that there's one solution that's clearly superior to others show a profound lack of understanding. The MSP430 LaunchPad you speak of may cost only $4.30, but there is a price --- very small amount of RAM (512 bytes) for the Valueline.
While the Android phones are good platform if you need all the fancy hardware and touch screen, they are lousy if you have to deploy more than one or two, price-wise. On the other hand, if you need some of the features that are already available on Android (or, STM32, for example) for much lower price, it would make little sense to add those features (Ethernet or wifi, for example) to Arduino unless you have legitimate reasons.
It all depends on what your target applications, man.
gee, i wonder where they got the idea? http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/135
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You obviously didn't RTFM or blog because she mentioned that LilyPad preceded her Flora design. FYI, the Flora design is different than the LilyPad so who cares if LilyPad came first if Flora has the features you'd want?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
...oh, wait, I remember. Those 'smart' clothes:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/18/apple_new_patent_big_brother_shoes/
Not gay enough to drive off Bible Thumpers and others not secure in their masculinity, apparently.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
California Strip Clubs now required to post signs warning "staring at G-Strings can cause Epileptic Seizures..
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Everyone is just bitching about how much better their favorite chip is than AVR. This isn't even an article about that. Save it for an article about different microcontrollers.
As for the "WTF would I do with a 'wearable platform'" questions - what happened to all the hackers on Slashdot? You know, the people who were actually interesting? Jesus, I don't know what you'd do with it. I don't know what I would do with it, to be honest, but whatever happened to that inventive spirit? Just because you can't think of anything doesn't mean it's useless.
Now allow me a minute of hypocrisy to discuss why I like AVR. When I want to prototype a microcontroller-based device, I don't need some $55 "Maple" device, or even an Arduino. I bought a tube of five ATmega328s from eBay for $7. I toss one on a breadboard with a 16 MHz crystal, a couple of capacitors and a pullup resistor for the reset pin and wire it up to a 5V power supply. When I make the final circuit, I throw a DIP socket on the board, and into that socket goes the programmed chip. Again, with just a crystal, two capacitors and a resistor (maybe with a decoupling cap, depending on the rest of the circuit). Total cost? Maybe $5.
No need to even use the Arduino "IDE" or anything else, if you don't want to. And why would you? It's crap, anyway. I edit the file in vim, and generally stay away from their slow helper functions like digitalWrite() in favor of direct register access. But sometimes, it's nice to throw an Arduino library in the project. They might not be fast, but hey, you're using a 16 MHz microcontroller! It's really easy to just #include and be ready to use an LCD.
<sig> </sig>
But it really just looks like an updated lilypad and not a new product. Which is allowed, of course, because the lilypad is open. But "designed from scratch" and then being based on the lilypad is sending mixed messages.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
not a mixed message really because when you take something as simple as the Arduino and decide to make it into a "wearable" platform, you're going to come up with things similar to someone else with a similar goal. And having followed Lady Ada for a while, I would trust her to do her best to think about the solution without lots of influence from previous products. ie the solution based on the goal and not just ways to extend someone elses product.
None of that stuff is really technical and just marketing fluff so if someone gets bent out of shape over it, I doubt they are going to be a customer of either platform.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The more gay guys there is, the more women are available.
The more lesbian women there is, well, I hope they got a webcam.