Click here to view the embedded video.

The carpet picks up the radio waves which your body receives and makes them “hearable.” When walking on the carpet you can tune it to a certain frequency, similar to the tuner of a radio.

I really love the idea of engaging with the things in our home to make them come ‘alive.’ Without the user, the carpet is silent and functions in a regular way. Walking across it completely transforms it into an interactive soft technology and brings a new element of sound into the environment.

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**

The next step was to create a logic-flow chart, which would form the foundation for writing our program. I had some help here, along with the programming, from the lovely Bryan (thank you Bryan!). Once the logic was written, the rest was easy for Bryan, and started to make some sense for me.

The ’sketch’ for now works as follows:

- we can now give the sketch a random heart rate, and it will calculate which track the MP3 player should play, and successfully move to that track. Believe me, it sounds much easier than it actually is! The last step now is to successfully get the heart rate monitor interface (HRMI) to talk to the arduino, which is what we are having problems with now.

I’m quite well versed in sewing, so this project has been fairly straightforward in terms of creating the wearable portion. The trickiest part is always creating the pattern. Holly and I want to create a high-collared garment, so that the speaker can be embedded within the collar next to the wearer’s ear. The collar is going to be higher on the speaker side, and then scrunch down on the other side, so the wearer can hear the environmental sounds as well. The photos I’ve posted show the beginnings of patterning, with a paper and mannequin mock-up, and then me wearing the very crude garment that I’ve thrown together, before the tailoring and adjustments I’ve made now.

Time for everyone to choose a direction and go with it! Time for us to share our ideas! And time to get working!! I am collaborating with ECUAD Masters student Holly Schmidt for the interactive wearables project. The idea is to work with the human heart rate, and externalize the interior sound of the body and the heart beating.

I wanted to see what else was out there using heart rate, and I came across Diana Eng’s project, Heartbeat Hoodie.

The hoodie uses a heart rate sensor and a camera to take pictures whenever your heart rate increases. The photos automatically upload to a blog that you can refer to or share with your friends. According to Eng, it is intended as a form of involuntary blogging.

“The camera is wired discreetly through the seeming of the garment to a basic stamp that communicates with a wireless heart rate monitor. The basic stamp uses an algorithm to analyze the heart beat for increases that might signify a moment of excitement or interest as opposed to physical exercise.”

The conecpt behind this project is useful for Holly and I because it is taking data from the heartrate and turning it into something else, something external. It also creates visual data from ‘excitment’ from the monitor involunatarily, which could provide some evidence or something you were not aware you were ‘excited’ about. It’s an interesting way of externalizing something internal, and the involunatry aspect is especially appealing to me.