What about making our jackets, shirts, and pants smarter in nature laced with the latest technology. Well, the concept about wearable’s cloth is not new as there are some companies working on smart clothing items. Adafruit is one of them who is publishing innovative wearable items at regular intervals. It has recently published a guide that shows how to make your jacket smarter. A Jacket installed with floral GPS, tracks your coordinates and pulses the lights around the color when you reach your destination.
This jacket actually reacts to your location with color-changing LEDs once you reach your destination. The strategy followed by Flora GPS Jacket is that it tracks your coordinates and then pulses the lights around the collar when you reach your destination. Further, you can change the waypoints and range in the provided project code to make your garment light up.
This so called advanced or smart jacket can be made using skills in FLORA, Flora RGB Smart Neo Pixels, Flora Wearable GP, Conductive Thread and Flora with Snaps. Further, the Flora GPS Starter Pack contain all the supplies you need for this project including some tools and start working
There is a perfect circuit diagram for the jacket and the connections is made to the circuit with conductive thread. The Collar is chained with eight pixels together where the circuit data connection is connected between each pixel. The GPS is attached or sewed to 3.3v, TX, RX, and ground. A 3xAAA battery holder is hidden in a pocket, which extends through a seam to plug into the JST port on the Flora.
The conductive thread is hidden under the top layer of fabric and to fix the GPS faster on the position and to keep track of its last known position even when the device is off, sew a coincell battery holder on the inside of the garment, connecting + to BAT on the GPS and – to GND. The code for the Flora GPS Jacket is pretty simple and straight forward and the standard Adafruit GPS Library is taken in use along with the NeoPixel Library.
Complete details along with videos, diagrams and coding are available on the website of Adafruit
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