Very exciting news indeed!!  We are honored to announce that the Bandeau Belt has been selected as one of 15 videos to be showcased on the BoatUS Foundation Page on Facebook.

Please visit this link right away and vote for our project!! Your votes will help the judges select the finalists, who will get the chance to showcase their products in person at the International Boating and Water Safety Summit in beautiful Savannah, Georgia, where the grand prize winner will be selected.

This competition is a major opportunity for us to gain exposure for this project. We are honored to have made it this far, and very much appreciate your help. So tell your friends, tell the world, the Bandeau Belt is your choice! Voting closes at midnight on February 28th, so act now

*A most sincere thanks in advance for your vote.

VOTE HERE!

We are very pleased to announce that the Bandeau Belt is going to be a part of South By Southwest 2011 this March in Austin, Texas!

Syuzi Pakhchyan of FashioningTech has invited the Bandeau Belt to be featured in her  wearable technology exhibition as a part of StyleX. In addition to the exhibition, the Bandeau Belt will also be a part of a runway show. Kathleen and I are extremely honored and excited to be a part of such an amazing event.

Stay tuned for more information…

We have recently submitted the Bandeau Belt to the 2011 BoatUS Foundation Innovations in Life Jacket Design Competition.

The competitions goal is to “encourage and solicit innovative ideas and new technology to design a life jacket that the majority of average boaters might wear.” (BoatUS Foundation)

While extremely advanced and impressive, it’s not often that the technologies of water safety devices are ever considered fashionable. Life Jackets, or personal flotation devices (PFDs), are utilitarian in style, with little consideration for social stigmas, lifestyle, and fashion. Many available PFDs offer great protection for active, sporty water activities, but there are no products suitable for the fashion-conscious woman who values both style and safety.

Our solution is the Bandeau Belt: an inflatable PFD that merges fashion with a utilitarian device to enhance the user’s experience on the water.

The Bandeau Belt comes in three unique styles that can be worn with an endless combination of yachting apparel. This PFD is a great choice for situations where there is a chance you may go into the water and are confident you will be able to pull the inflation cord in the case of an emergency. To activate, simply pull the cord on the Bandeau Belt. The safety pin pierces a CO2 cylinder, which fills the inflatable bladder housed within. The inflated bladder emerges from the bottom of the Bandeau Belt and is then placed over the head to provide buoyancy and safety. In the case of a mechanism failure, the bladder can also be inflated orally.

The design challenge is steep; 80% of boating related deaths are due to victims not wearing a PFD. Our goal was to change the face of safety equipment and increase wear-rates for water activities by seamlessly merging function and safety technology with a product that is stylish and desirable to wear.

That’s right, you guessed it: success. The changeover to the lilypad arduino went smoothly, and when we hooked it up to the battery power source everything worked!So now the technology pieces must be integrated into the garment. This will involve some temporary tacking and pockets, because we’re not sure exactly how it will work/feel once it is part of the vest. So before permanently altering the garment I’ve worked so hard on, we’ll try some arrangements and continue to develop that aspect later. But for now, we are both very happy with what we have.

Although it’s not done yet, I’ve posted some photos of the vest (a work in progress).So everyone will just have to wait and see how the whole thing looks together tomorrow morning.

Good luck everyone!

Thanks to the code Bryan helped us write, and some soldering skills from Holly and I, we have built upon what we have got so far, and today we were able to get the HRMI to communicate with the arduino! In short, we successfully asked the HRMI for a heart rate, the arduino calculated what “track” we should then be at, and moved the MP3 player to the correct track number! I was wearing the heart rate monitor, and it was playing different tracks as my heart rate changed. We were so excited and happy that it worked that my heart rate was increasing and the tracks were changing accordingly! It was brilliant, believe me.

The image I’ve posted is a screen shot that shows ‘proof’ that we got it to work. We are just a bit scared that once we try to transfer everything from the breadboard to the lilypad that something might screw up. So I’ve ‘documented’ the achievement as best I could.

In order to get the HRMI to talk to the arduino, we had to change some of the settings on the HRMI that came as factory default (this was the key). We needed to install the OPO jumper so that the HRMI could operate on I2C signals. This meant that we also had to uninstall the SJ1 jumper.

The next step is to move everything from the breadboard to the lilypad, which is, as I mentioned, the scariest part.

Cross your fingers for me**