This Soft Wearable, Made From an Old Sock, Offers Three Capacitive Buttons and UWB Positioning

Built for wearable control of a room lighting setup, this upcycled sock includes 3D localization functionality.

Gareth Halfacree
2 years agoUpcycling / HW101 / Wearables

Pseudonymous maker "00legendary" has built a wireless LED controller with a difference: it's a soft-electronic wearable, driven by a customized controller board built into an old sock — and boasting 3D localization functionality.

"[There's a] custom board embedded into the back side of the sock," 00legendary explains of their unusual build. "An Arduino [is] used as a receiver and executes LED commands. [The buttons are] capacitive sensing woven into the fabric, [but] at the moment e-textiles are not very friendly to general consumers."

This soft-circuit wearable is designed for control of an LED room lighting setup. (📹: 00legendary)

The three-button wearable, which is designed to be positioned on the user's wrist, offers adjustable control over a wall-mounted RGB LED lighting strip. Presses are detected by a customized controller board, featuring a Decawave DWM1000 ultrawide-band (UWB) transceiver — offering the wearable's second operation mode: 3D localization of the user's wrist.

"[I] already [added localization]," 00legendary explains of the reason for not demonstrating the second operation mode: "I just haven't made a video of it as of late. I have to figure out an attractive way to present it."

More details on the project are available on 00legendary's Reddit thread; source code and schematics were not available at the time of writing.f

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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