Announcing Adafruit Gemma – Miniature Wearable Electronic Platform 44
coop0030 writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit has announced a new tiny wearable electronics platform board called the Gemma. The Gemma is a tiny, 1-inch diameter and 4-mm thick package. It's powered by an Attiny85 and programmable with an Arduino IDE over USB. There are three available I/O pins, one of which is also an analog input and two of which can do PWM output. Gemma is currently wrapping up development, but should be available soon."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's all good and interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
If you enjoy being fondled and yelled at while a nightstick is at your throat? Yes it is 100% TSA friendly.
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Does it support "do not track".
And if they know NOT to track, aren't you already "meta-tracked"?
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The correct term is "pre-tracked".
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Oh, man! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
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Re:It's all good and interesting... (Score:4, Funny)
but does it run Crysis?
Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels.
In a way I'm glad this stuff isn't too popular... womens sweatpants flashing out morse code "juicy" isn't all that appealing.
One unfortunate thing is its an inch around. A hair smaller (24 mm?) and it would fit in a "one inch" model rocket tube.
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Speak for yourself ... me, I'll be in my bunk.
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Tapping out *something* no doubt
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Tapping out "-- . .-- .- -. -" no doubt.
ME WANT (for those who don't read code).
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Re:It's all good and interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels.
In a way I'm glad this stuff isn't too popular... womens sweatpants flashing out morse code "juicy" isn't all that appealing.
With PWM support, I've bit-banged composite video with only a single IO pin.
Also a lot of the new LCD/oLED controllers are a serial interface like i2c or SPI, which would be an option here too.
Just combine this not-yet-available chip with one of those not-yet-available flexible/wearable oLED strips sewn into the ass of said sweatpants, and the juice is on.
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Yes but with only two PWM outputs all you get is two pixels.
With two pins you get I2C and thus I/O expansion and as many pixels as you want.
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You must use really crappy led's. I can control 256 pixels at 8 bits color with this device.
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You must use really crappy led's. I can control 256 pixels at 8 bits color with this device.
sure, you can control a million leds with it if the leds are behind extra circuitry(including circuitry "built into the led").
it doesn't have too much of free ram though, so make it a million pixels of noise.
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The code is stored in flash ROM and there is a fair amount of it, you can write very sophisticated programs that only need a few bytes of RAM if you are clever.
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One unfortunate thing is its an inch around. A hair smaller (24 mm?) and it would fit in a "one inch" model rocket tube.
The design is open source. Download the gerber files, edit them and send away for your own boards. There are low-volume low-cost options like batchpcb and iteadstudios and you can have the boards you want for just a few dollars.
question (Score:2, Flamebait)
Can I wash it?
Re:question (Score:5, Informative)
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There is nothing on that board that won't withstand a dunking in water. In fact I clean the flux from my soldering with copious hot water and a toothbrush. Just remove the battery and it can go right into the wash.
Re:question (Score:4, Interesting)
it takes less than 12 seconds (and a 24 hour cure time) to make it withstand a dunk in water without problems... Have you never heard of epoxy?
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I've also heard of batteries that need replacing, epoxy kind of puts a damper on that.
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There are a lot of water proof power connectors out there, or you can do something outrageous and use an enclosure, I know wild and crazy notion....
If you put in a tiny bit of effort, you can easily waterproof (as in dunked or rain) anything.
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Wearable electronics lose their appeal if your tee shirt has to have a bulky module someplace. It's fine for a coat or maybe a jacket but lame for basically anything lighter than that.
In a completed design I suspect it would be wiser to deadbug the attiny, sandwich it between some thin metal plates (Aluminum probably) and then pot it with epoxy than to use one of these at all. But this seems pretty slick for prototyping, which I have always seen as the major role of Arduino.
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I consider anything bulky on a tshirt. None of this wearable stuff is for tshirts. Leather jacket, I can mount a 3"X2"X1/2" box easily that will not bother anyone.
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I consider anything bulky on a tshirt. None of this wearable stuff is for tshirts.
But there are in fact various electronic tshirts now...
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This is Slashdot; your mom will wash it.
I've worked with the ATtiny85... (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's awesome. It has a pile of cool peripherals that can be switched onto each pin. I took apart my LED flashlight the other day and found one of it's little brothers (also an 8 pin SOIC) doing the modulating to control the power to the LED. Just an IC and four components.
This is one of the rare micros that you could actually make a market competitive product out of.
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Just saw a demo from dfrobot last night at xinchejian hackerspace that has super potential. It was designed to make entry to arduino much more attainable. At a 20rmb retail price and 3pwm 3analog spi and a tiny connector for programming makes it a much better solution for wearable electronics. They said its coming out in Feb.