Non-standard Circuits: Jazz For Electrons

How creative are you when you make your circuit boards? Do you hunt around for different materials to use for the board? As long as it’s an insulator and can handle the heat of a soldering iron, then anything’s fair game. Or do you use a board at all? Let’s explore some options, both old favorites and some you may not have seen before, and see if we can get our creative juices flowing.

Transparent Circuit Boards

Let’s start with the desire to show more circuit and less board. For that we can start with [CNLohr]’s circuits on glass, usually …read more

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Wearable Superconductors

What do you do with a discarded bit of superconducting wire? If you’re [Patrick Adair], you turn it into a ring.

Superconducting wire has been around for decades now. Typically it is a thick wire made up of strands of titanium and niobium encased in copper. Used sections of this wire show up on the open market from time to time. [Patrick] got ahold of some, and with his buddies at the waterjet channel, they cut it into slices. It was then over to the lathe to shape the ring.

Once the basic shape was created, [Patrick] placed the ring …read more

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Be the Firebender You Want to See in the World

Always wanted to be a citizen of Fire Nation? Here’s one way to ace the citizenship exam: punch-activated flaming kung fu gauntlets of doom.

As with all the many, many, many flamethrower projects we’ve featured before, we’ve got to say this is just as bad an idea as they are and that you should not build any of them. That said, [Sufficiently Advanced]’s wrist-mounted, dual-wielding flamethrowers are pretty cool. Fueled by butane and containing enough of the right parts for even a minimally talented prosecutor to make federal bomb-making charges stick, the gauntlets each have an Arduino and accelerometer to …read more

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Wearable Breadboard

We all know what a short circuit is, but [Clement Zheng] and [Manasvi Lalwani] want to introduce you to the shirt circuit. Their goal is to help children, teachers and parents explore and learn electronics. The vehicle is a shirt with a breadboard-like pattern of conductors attaching snaps. Circuit elements reside in stiff felt boxes with matching snaps. You can see it all in action in the video below.

We imagine you could cut the felt pieces out by hand with the included patterns. However, they used a laser cutter to produce the “breadboard” and the component containers. Conductive thread …read more

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Making a Wearable NFC Bus Pass

[Stephen Cognetta] is trying to get the total number of things he owns down below 115, and he’s always looking for ways to streamline his life.

Toward this goal he dissolved his SF Transit Clipper Card in acetone to get at the NFC tag embedded inside. The tag consists of a tiny chip attached to an antenna the size of the card itself. It took about three days (video below the break) for the layers to separate and [Stephen] was able to extricate the tag.

He ended up trying a few different ways of storing the delicate chip and antenna, …read more

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Go Big or Go Home: A Tablecloth Touchpad

Phone screens keep getting bigger. Computer screens keep getting bigger. Why not a large trackpad to use as a mouse? [MaddyMaxey] had that thought and with a few components and some sewing skills created a trackpad in a tablecloth.

The electronics in this project are right off the shelf. A Flora board for the brains and 4 capacitive touch boards. If you haven’t seen the Flora, it is a circular-shaped Arduino made for sewing into things. The real interesting part is the construction. If you haven’t worked with conductive fabric and thread, this will be a real eye-opener. [Maddy’s] blog …read more

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“Norman, coordinate!”

If Star Trek taught us anything, it’s clearly that we’re not quite in the future yet. Case in point: androids are not supposed to be little flecks of printed circuits with wires and jacks sprouting off them. Androids are supposed to be gorgeous fembots in polyester kimonos with beehive hairdos, designed to do our bidding and controlled by flashing, beeping, serial number necklaces.

Not willing to wait till the 23rd century for this glorious day, [Peter Walsh] designed and built his own android amulet prop from the original series episode “I, Mudd.” There’s a clip below if you need a …read more

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Wearable Predicts Tone of Conversation from Speech, Vital Signs

If you’ve ever wondered how people are really feeling during a conversation, you’re not alone. By and large, we rely on a huge number of cues — body language, speech, eye contact, and a million others — to determine the feelings of others. It’s an inexact science to say the least. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a wearable system to analyze the tone of a conversation.

The system uses Samsung Simband wearables, which are capable of measuring several physiological markers — heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, and skin temperature — as well as movement thanks to an on-board …read more

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Bluetooth Automation Remote Hangs Around

Using your smartphone to control your home automation system gives you a lot of flexibility. But for something as simple as turning the lights on and off, it can be a pain to go through the whole process of unlocking your phone, choosing the right browser page or app, and then finally hitting the button you need. It’d be much simpler if it could all be done at the touch of a single, physical button – but phones don’t have many of those anymore. [falldeaf] brings the solution – a four-button Bluetooth remote for your smartphone that’s wearable, to boot. …read more

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IoT Nightmare: Wearable Health Gadgets Pose New Kind of Privacy Risks for Users

By Carolina

With the emergence of wearable gadgets like Smartwatches, researchers are trying to provide smart alternatives of everything including personal health monitoring. Hence, wearable devices like heart rate monitors, stress level calculator, calorie counter and sleep pattern observer devices came into existence. These are quite fun to use as you get instant, HANDS ON information about […]

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