SparkFun
Lilypad USB Plus
This is the LilyPad USB Plus, a sewable electronics microcontroller board controlled by an ATmega32U4 with the Arduino bootloader. It has a built in power s...
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This is the LilyPad USB Plus, a sewable electronics microcontroller board controlled by an ATmega32U4 with the Arduino bootloader. It has a built in power supply JST (and recharge circuit) and an on/off switch with the only extra piece of hardware you need to program the LilyPad USB Plus being a micro-USB cable. We’ve also added an RGB LED in the dead-center of the board along with six white LEDs to act as a sort of bar graph. The LilyPad USB Plus was designed to streamline your next sewable project by keeping things simple and giving you more room to work while eliminating the need to sew a power supply.
It has fourteen sew tabs for connecting components with conductive thread. Four of these tabs are reserved for connecting power and ground of LilyPad sensors and accessory boards, and ten are input/output (I/O). For reference, each sew tab has a nearby label with its name and the pin number it is connected to on the ATmega32U4 chip at its center.
LilyPad is a wearable e-textile technology developed by Leah Buechley and cooperatively designed by Leah and SparkFun. Each LilyPad was creatively designed to have large connecting pads to allow them to be sewn into clothing. Various input, output, power, and sensor boards are available in the LilyPad line but will also work with most other wearable e-textile lines. They’re even washable!
Note: A portion of this sale is given back to Dr. Leah Buechley for continued development and education in e-textiles.
Jargon buster
Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.
- Bootloader
- Small starter software on a microcontroller that lets new code be uploaded before the main program runs. Knowing how to enter bootloader mode matters when you need to program the board or recover it after a faulty sketch.
- conductive thread
- Thread made with metal or other conductive fibres so it can carry electricity while being sewn into fabric. It matters for wearable and textile projects because it can replace wire, but it has more resistance than normal hookup wire.
- e-textiles
- Electronic textiles are fabrics or clothing that include electrical parts such as conductive thread, sensors, LEDs, or small controllers. This matters because parts for e-textiles need to survive bending, sewing, and sometimes washing.
- LED
- A light-emitting diode (LED) is a small electronic component that emits light when current flows through it in the correct direction. Because it only conducts one way, its polarity matters, and a through-hole LED must be soldered the correct way around to light up.
- microcontroller
- A microcontroller is a small computer on a single chip that runs a stored program and controls connected inputs and outputs such as buttons, sensors, displays and communication interfaces. In a device built around one, it is the part that executes the code and coordinates the device's behaviour.
- RGB
- Short for red, green and blue, the three primary colours of light that are mixed in varying amounts to make a wide range of colours. In electronics RGB can refer to an LED or pixel that blends these three colours, or to a colour signal or interface that carries separate red, green and blue channels.
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