Welcome to EduWear

The way we connect at the moment is not very beautiful but we did not find a better prototyping connection yet.

We use color-code cable soldered on connectors. Either you use a board with all the cables put in or (in case it looks to technical/chaotic) you put in some connector (you can just break the connections). Less then 3 pins get unstable. When you do it yourself you have to check that the green ones go into the digital, the orange ones in analog, the black ones in GND and the red one in AREF and 5V (!). Otherwise the “color-code” does not work.

To connect to the yarn you can use luster terminals as I show on the video here.

For the workshop in Sweden there is a new German and a new English version of the software for Windows. I hope I can add Mac Versions later.

New feature we have:

a block to play a Melody with a Piezo speaker

a block to collect Data with sensors and upload it

Atmega168 is now standard

Some Bugs are fixed

Tooltips are hard to understand

some wrong captions on the menus

alerts

forgets values when saving

can only monitor sensors/not switches

To run the Software on your Windows machine you start by downloading it on the Eduwear Blog in the Software Development category.

Download the Video (it is an Avi file)

Afterward you have to extract the zipped Archive.

Download the Video (it is an Avi file)

Change into the win folder and double-click on run.but

Download the Video (it is an Avi file)

The software starts up and you are ready to program.

Drag the blocks under the “Loop” block. Some blocks have a “connector” on the right side and you have to add another block i.e. a variable. An example is the “onfor” block. It needs to know how long it should switch something on. Therefore it needs a variable on its right.

Download the Video (it is an Avi file)

To transfer the program to the board change to the code view by clicking the code button. Compile the program and choose the right serial port. Click the button on the board and afterwards the button “upload” in the software.

Download the Video (it is a Flash movie)

Congratulations. You uploaded your first program when it says “Done uploading” in the software.

Most schools do not have the tools required to work with the electronic/textile combination. Therefore we packed a teacher’s kit in addition to the kit for children.

As you can see, we have a multimeter, special scissors that work with the conductive yarn, clips, cable, a battery and connector, the board, examples (i.e. prepared gloves that can act as sensors), a textile bus (to demonstrate basic principles of electronics), software, sensors/actuators, fabric, a manual  and yarn.

There are still parts we are not sure about: do we need a lab power supply, a soldering iron and a breadboard?

The gloves prove quite successful so far. All kids were fascinated by the glow-in-the-dark color and one boy is working on an idea very similar to Deirdre’s and Eimear’s glove. I will give you more information about the project next week.

Currently I am writing programs to allow an easy upload of data collected by the sensors similar to the Handy Crickets Data Recording. By using Arduino there are only 512 bytes EEPROM space and there is no possiblitiy to upload a textfile containing the data without changing Arduino itself (what I do anyway). The good thing about EEPROM is that you do not loose the data in case the board is not powered. I work on a block where you can choose if you want to measure one or two sensors and in what time frame you want to measure. Later on you can upload the data you collected into an excel file.

Hello all,

after some time I was finally able to select and upload pics from the workshop during our second meeting in Bremen…I hope you’ll find them useful.

Tomas

Pics from the 2nd Eduwear meeting

Sound is an output children like and use often. To use it easily with Arduino I wrote a library based on D. Cuartielles and Clay Shirky’s Melody Tutorial.

With the sound block you can add a tone played for a certain time to your program. I know it is not really microseconds but I think it is fair enough.