Beginning e-Textile Development: Prototyping e-Textiles with Wearic Smart Textiles Kit and the BBC micro:bit

Electronic textiles (e-textiles) involves the combination of electronics and textiles to form "smart" textile products. It is an emerging technology with immense opportunities in the field of wearables fashion technology. And while there are many e-textile development platforms available on the market, this book uses the Wearic smart textile kit, a modular prototyping platform, to get you building projects and experiments easily and quickly.

This book presents the essential skills required to get started developing e-textiles. The code presented is built using MakeCode blocks, an easy-to-use visual programming language. You'll use the BBC micro:bit microcontroller for all the projects, and with few exceptions, they require no soldering and wiring. In the end, you'll be able to apply and sew electronics to wearables, garments, and fabrics in this emerging technology.

Beginning e-Textile Development presents the essential components to get you started with developing e-textiles.

What You'll Learn

• Program with the BBC micro:bit
• Add lights to your wearables using LED textiles
• Use different textile sensors to measure heat, detect water, actuate attachments, and enable sense touch and pressure
• Actuate attachments on wearables with muscle activity and heartbeat
• Make chemistry-based color-changing fabrics using thermochromic pigments
• Utilize Bluetooth Low Energy to send sensor data to mobile apps and WiFi to send sensor data to the ThingSpeak IoT analytics platform service

Who This Book Is For

Beginners to the e-textile industry seeking a comprehensive toolkit. Fashion designers, Makers, engineers, scientists, and students can all benefit from this book.

About the Author

Pradeeka Seneviratne is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience in computer programming and systems design. He is an expert in the development of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-based embedded systems and is currently a full-time embedded software engineer working with embedded systems and highly scalable technologies. Previously, Pradeeka worked as a software engineer for several IT infrastructure and technology servicing companies.