Xbees

We were told Xbees are easy to use. LIES!

Seriously, they are quite a pain to get running properly. We were eyeing the idea of making the Xbee a digital switch. Essentially sending data every time one of the digital pins of the Xbee is pulled HIGH. That did NOT work. We had to spend 3 days with Elio (because X-CTU only worked on his laptop) only to configure the radios. Final decision : default firmware for the coordinator and for the node.

The t-shirts

The shirts were going to be our switch. Essentially by using a large and intricate pattern, we would be able to make a large switch with 2 t-shirts. When they collide, some pin on the Arduino goes HIGH.

The second part of the t-shirt switch is the use of sweat. Thread placed in sweat-sensitive areas would trigger another pin HIGH on the Arduino. Effectively giving us 2 different switches to work with.