E-Textiles and Wearables II

My first idea was to create a chest belt for people who run. In order to reach their training goals, I wanted to include a sensor which measures their current speed and sends a signal to a vibration motor as so as their desired speed is reached. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the right velocity sensor.

I stayed with the idea of the Chest belt and vibrations motor (LilyPad Vibration motor). I found the GY-521 MPU-6050 a Accelerometer + 3 axis Gyro Sensor. I decided to try to built an emergency Fall Sensor which sends a signal to the vibration motor whenever the person bends too much forward (Falling).

First I connected the Sensor and the Vibration motor to a Ardunio board and a mini breadboard to test if everything is working. Later I exchanged the Arduino board with a LilyPad Arduino 328 Main Board
I downloaded the arduino library mpu6050 due to the fact that it works with the GY-521 MPU-6050 perfectly hand in hand. The code has all the basic information you need in order for the Sensor to work. It was very tricky for me to do the encoding, so that the Vibration motor only reacts when somebody is bending too far forward. For that, I used the “if /else statement“. I decided to first concentrated on just one axis. It works but sadly only quite very randomly. I'm still working on it.

For the chest belt I used felting. I figured out that GY-521 is not optimal for the use on wearables. It is very tricky to mount it onto the fabric. That is why I would recommend to use a different sensor. Due to the use of cross over connections I had to use a lot of jumper cables which was not an optimal solution.