SteamPunk Pendant with Round PCB

Made another Steampunk pendant necklace using upcycled parts scavenged from broken items around the house. This one uses a repurposed PCB. That's not very unusual in my projects, but this PCB is round with a hole in the center, which is very unusual.

The round PCB had a pretty green color, and I added some broken bling to it along with some scavenged bits from old jewelry and a faux gear from the craft store just to validate the Steampunk theme/ When it's all put together I think it works as a pendant quite well.

I don't remember where the board came from, maybe an old mouse or an old radio knob assembly. But I do remember having it sitting in the collection and taunting me for a long time until I finally decided to use it whether the project turned out nice or not.

See, I have a hard time using unusual parts because I'm always afraid I will fail and waste the one unique chance to ever use such a part. If it's a common, standard part then I'll take chances and use it quickly because I can always get another chance with another copy. But this is the first round PCB I had ever found and I waited and waited and waited.





Then inspiration struck, and after a year or more of hesitation, the entire piece came together in a matter of minutes - and I like it. I even found a way to decorate the back side so that it's at least not ugly or distracting if it spins around while being worn..

I even decorated the back of the pendant because necklaces tend to flip around when they are being worn. The back of the PCB was a dull brown, so I covered it with a large fake gear for the steampunk look and even added an oh-so-popular wing to complete the composition. It's not pretty enough for the featured front, but I think it's good enough for the hidden back.

But I waited a while to post it. I wanted to see if I still liked the final product after a few days, or maybe I was just so relieved to be rid of the teasing piece of electronic scrap that I had convinced myself it was attractive.

Well, it's been a few days and I still kind of like it so I decided to post it.

Unfortunately, in the same burst of creation, I also made a really ugly project from a unique part. I kept adding pieces and colors and sparkly things to that project hoping it would "come together" as a composition - and it remained ugly with every added part - at least to me.










I'll also give this failed project a few days and see if it grows on me. Or maybe I will decide that some people might actually like the large clunky thing. Or, I might just keep adding things to it until I can pretend that I had always intended for it to be one of those monstrous accretions you sometimes see in vintage stores.

Meanwhile. I'm working on another project that seems to be holding together as I add the parts. If I don't blow it, I might have a completely different style of PCB jewelry to share in a few days.

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Light-up Cosplay Boots may be happening

Both my hiking-boots and my work-boots completely wore out this summer. Cracked soles, popped rivets and split seams now make them useless for their intended tasks. However, their well-worn look gives them a lot of character and makes them good candidates for some sci-fi cosplay modifications.

I think it's time to revisit light-up shoe projects. Slap some LEDs or some EL-wire on those suckers and call the space-bound. I've already done lighting projects with tennis shoes and with high heels. But this time, it's going to be a little more industrial looking.

I might just add some glowing EL-wire panels to the boots and call it done,

I might keep it simple and just use some simple EL-wire or maybe some EL-panels. That's certainly easy to do. But of curse I have grand ideas about controllable light shows like in the summer blockbuster movies. I have some spare microcontrollers and extra LEDs in the shop that are taunting me from their dusty shelf.

And new products like the sensor laden Circuit Playground and the Bluetooth or LORA Feather boards suddenly make real interactive and controllable light shows possible for a reasonable price. My previous projects were limited to a few pre-set, repetitive light sequences and simple pressure-switches.

I haven't done any real designs yet, not even a single sketch - so I don't have anything to show you for now. However, I've done acceleration projects and sound based projects with the Playground, and my Bluetooth skills are coming along nicely. If I combine these with my old Neopixel controller code I might have a good start on some off-world footwear.

I still needed to refresh my memory on how these things are done - so I went back and re-found some of my favorite inspirational projects and tutorials. This time I decided to take notes and make an easy to use collection of helpful links and I thought I would share them here..








Most of the tutorials and guides I knew of all revolve around either sneakers or high heels. You know, normal everyday footwear - not the stuff of exo-planet explorers. But it's all I could find, so here's a list of my favorites to get you started:.

Sneakers and Tennis-shoes

• Probably the classic tutorial is Becky Stern's Firewalker shoes from Adafruit. It's so good they did it twice, once with the Flora board and again with the smaller (and cheaper) Gemma board.
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• https://www.instructables.com/id/Light-Up-Shoes-for-Adults/
• Another fun yet simple build, no Arduino required
• How about some simple to use EL-Wire sneakers

Heels

• Add some fantasy and LEDs to your heels here 
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• Classy and simple lifts plus LEDs 
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• Dorothy's Ruby slippers with a hi-tech twist

Above and Beyond

• Not only do they have LEDs, these heels feature R2D2
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• Turn old sneakers into stomp activated combat-boots
• Blade Runner Platforms Sandals with layers of lights
• Stockings with sewable strands of LEDs
• Clear Acrylic Stage Platform Heels  with LEDs or...
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• Platform gogo boots with a projector 
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• Not shoes, but the fiber-optic poof is cool
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• Or maybe some flowery LED clip-ons for your dancing shoes

Right now, I'm thinking some rack-mount headlights, some basic running lights and some sound reactive and acceleration reactive lights. Since these are boots, I can add some clunky control panels without destroying the lines of the shoe - big and clunky work well with boots.

If you have any ideas, images or tips to share for cosplay boots, please send them my way. I'll try to post up some progress pics soon.

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Connecting App Inventor and Bluetooth Low Energy

Finally found a great tutorial on using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with MIT's App Inventor for Android. The guide is well written with lots of details on the connection process. This isn't surprising since (I think) the author is one of the people who created the BLE extension for App Inventor.

Check out the tutorial at Hackster.io

I've been using App Inventor with Bluetooth classic for a while now and am comfortable shipping data to and from several versions of Bluetooth modules. But the new BLE extension for App Inventor looked like it was a lot more complex to use, so I had avoided it until now. I still don't understand what all the extension's functions do, but the tutorial allowed me to get connected and communicating in just a few minutes.

Got a basic interface created and it's talking to the Feather board well enough to control color, speed and direction

The tutorial uses Adafruit's BLE Feather. The Feather line of boards is one of my favorite IOT platforms. It's a small but powerful Arduino compatible board, and there is a wide range of add-on shields for it. There are shields for controlling motors, LEDs, graphic displays etc. Adafruit also has BLE breakouts for adding to other boards.

And they already have free apps for both Android and  iOS for communicating with the BLE version of the Feather board. The apps are powerful and easy to use, but I wanted to create some custom functionality.My first project is to create an interface to give me more control over the Feather NeoPixel shield. This will come as no surprise to most of you - I always start learning new platforms with NeoPixels.








I'm not ready to talk much about the project yet. It's functioning and stable, but it's awkward to use. It's also a lot more complex than most of my Android projects, so I'm forced to get back into the whole UI/UX thing for the first time in years. Giving all those cues to the user is taking up a lot of my coding time, maybe more than the basic functionality.

In fact, I will probably have to break down the (soon to be released) tutorial into multiple steps - connecting, tracking settings, packaging data and UI manipulation - for both the Android side and Arduino side of things.

I'm telling myself all this work is worth it because I will finally have a full stack of parts that will allow me to create both household and wearable items that can be controlled over a phone by a non-techie. Stay tuned...

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