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Adafruit's Open-source Wearable Platform, Flora

Posted by timothy on from the replace-all-your-clothes dept.

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."

5 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Why Atmel? by Timmmm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seems like a strange decision to use an Atmel chip when everyone is moving to Cortex M-3.

    1. Re:Why Atmel? by ThePeices · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He is not talking about how easy it is to program on an ARM toolset vs Atmel, hes talking about the complexity of the processor itself.

      The Atmel AVR is an 8-bit microcontroller, the ARM Cortex-M is a 16/32 bit device, with far more transistors than an ATMEGA.

      For the sort of thing that Adafruit are needing to do, an ATMEGA is more than adequate.

  2. Does anyone care about "wearable" platforms? by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. Careful now. by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Funny

    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."
  4. Re:Arduino has been left in the dust long time ago by introcept · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's always the AVR GNU toolchain for programming Arduino boards in C. It comes with the (free) WinAVR IDE/Debugger and works with any IDE that can handle GCC et al.
    Personally, I can't stand the way TI have tied their products to Code Composer Studio. It's free for some of the cheaper devices but if you want to use it on anything with a bit of muscle you'll be shelling out $500+ just to be able to program/debug the hardware you own.