||| Concept |||
Our concept was to design a weather pillow that could also function as a silent, vibrating alarm. Designed to be soft and attractive, this pillow could sit on the user's bed along with other pillows or blankets. Moreover, the pillow, when kept near the head, could function as an alarm, vibrating instead of, or along with, a sound alarm. Information about the weather, gathered from an Android phone, would display as different colors on an RGB LED placed on the outside of the pillow. The Android phone would also function as the control for the alarm; an alarm would be set on the Android and then, at the time the alarm would go off, the Android would send a signal to the pillow, turning on a motor that would function as a vibrator.
||| Materials |||
+ LilyPad Arduino (or "home-made" one, see below)
+ Bluetooth chip
+ Android phone
+ RGB LED (part of LilyPad package)
+ Lilypad motor
+ External battery
+ Conductive thread (used for wiring purposes)
+ Metal wire
+ Solder
+ Foam
+ Material for pillow case
||| Circuit Design |||
We built our own fabric Lilypad Arduino. Leah Buechley's instructions can be found here. From there, we designed our circuit.
Before sewing, we prototyped with alligator clips and getting everything working too multiple steps!
||| Construction |||
Constructing the pillow and sewing the circuit together required multiple steps.
First we cut out foam to fill the pillow. We also cut out holes in the foam where the larger components could sit, including the Lilypad and Bluetooth component and the battery and holder, and the motor (the motor, itself, we encased in a bottle cap surrounded in cellophane to protect it.)
We cut out and sewed a simple pillowcase of a slightly larger size, and left this aside.
We then placed the large components in their cut-out places in the foam, and sewed the circuit together. As there were many metal components (the motor, the transistor, the battery) we used a combination of soldering thin wire to the metal components and tying knots and sewing fabric components together with conductive thread.
||| Video of Pillow in Action |||
http://vimeo.com/10915502
||| Arduino & Amarino Code |||
The Arduino code for the Lilypad can be found here.
||| Lessons Learned |||
We spent many many hours troubleshooting the circuit and the connection to the motor. Ultimately, we could not get the pager motor to work, and used a Lilypad motor. We connected this motor to the microprocessor without a transistor and it worked fine.
Another problem we had was access to the circuit and components. In order for the pillow to have the LED and snap on the outside, the pillow essentially needed to be in place, with the foam inside the pillow case, in our final stage of troubleshooting. This was not only awkward but also weakened the connections. Next time, we would definitely need to design a better way to access the Lilypad, battery, bluetooth and other connections.
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