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."

Comments

Why Atmel?

[Timmmm]

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

Re:Why Atmel?

[ThePeices]

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.

Careful now.

[MrEricSir]

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.)