UPDATE: The Skull Shirt will be making an appearance on Oct. 11 at the AndroidOpen MakerFaire in SF.
The Skull Shirt is an experiment in creating digital clothing that can be connected to your phone. The shirt itself uses the Lilypad Arduino to control the lights. Then there’s a Bluetooth connector which speaks to a custom Android app on my phone (using the Amarino framework). Then, I enhanced the Android app to use the Twitter Streaming API, so that whenever you send me a Tweet, it will send a command to the shirt and it will light up.
Here’s a demo and explanation of the whole system.
Links to relevant pieces:
- LilyPad – Arduino designed to be sewn into clothing
- Amarino – A toolkit for simple communication between Android and Arduino
- Sparkfun – a good place to buy Lilypad supplies
- HangMHigh Vintage Western Wear – A great place to buy shirts with skulls and flames
Source code and an instructable will be released soon. In the meantime, here are some pics from the creation process.
