Hi, Steven here from Core Electronics. In this video, we're going to talk about e-textiles and wearables boards. Which one to choose and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

The first one we're going to look at is the LilyPad. LilyPad was one of the first wearables boards on the market and really kind of set the standard for what we expect out of an e-textiles or wearables microcontroller. It's got a round profile, it's got large holes so you can easily thread through. You can easily sew it with conductive thread and it's nice and light and small.

Some of the advantages of a LilyPad is it's basically an Arduino Leonardo baked into a circular board. It's got a JST-PH connector so you can power it from a battery pack really easily and it has built-in LiPo charging. So if you connect a LiPo battery and connect it to USB, then it will charge that battery automatically if it's in the charge position.

Now there's some advantages and disadvantages to this. If you're using a LiPo battery, then that's great. There's no disadvantages. But if you're going to use a standard battery pack like this one that has AA batteries in it and you connect it to USB with the battery pack connected, then it's going to put power into your standard alkaline batteries and that can cause them to become damaged or start a fire or something else unpleasant. So you need to be careful with boards that have charging built-in if you're not going to use LiPo batteries.

So the LilyPad can do anything that an Arduino can do. It has, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, it has ten pins, four analog ins and outs and five, let's see, four or five digital ins and outs. It is good for anything that a basic Arduino can do and not a whole lotSure, here is the transcript formatted into paragraphs:

more. So while this is a great board, it hasn't really evolved over time to keep up with microcontroller markets and there's a lot of other options out there that are more exciting that we're going to talk about today.

One of the first ones that comes to mind when I think about new wearables boards that have a lot of potential is the Gemma M0. This board is tiny and it has a very powerful microcontroller processor in it. So we're talking about 25 times approximately the speed of a LilyPad if you're really getting into some heavy processing.

Honestly, with a wearables project and a board this size, you're probably not going to need it. But it's there. And it has a small dot star LED built into the board that can be programmed to be any colour you like. And while there's only three pins that are both, that are each usable as digital and analog inputs and outputs, those pins happen to be capacitive touch sensitive, so you can use them as a touch sensitive switch.

And where this board really shines is that it can be programmed four different ways. So you can program it with MakeCode, which is a drag and drop block based editor. You can program it with JavaScript through MakeCode. You can program it with CircuitPython, which is a derivative of Python. And you can program it with Arduino for the highest level control. So also it has a battery connector on it so you can connect the battery easily as well.

This board's tiny, it's inexpensive, and for simple wearables projects, it can do anything. So as long as you can handle three pins, that's probably my highest recommended board is the Gemma M0.

Next one we're going to talk about today is the Microbit. Micro:Bit isn't something that you usually think of when you think ofSure, here is the closed-captions transcript formatted into paragraphs:

"A wearables board because it's not really in the wearables footprint. But it is in kind of the wearables board's price range and what you'd look for in the capabilities of a wearable. So the Micro:Bit has a lot of sensors built in. It has resistive touch sensitive pins. It has a couple buttons, it has the LED array, and then it has other sensors like you can sense temperature and light and an accelerometer, magnetometer, and there's a Bluetooth and radio built in, all for a very low price.

So when it comes to what you're getting out versus how much you need to put in to get your project working, Microbit's a really great option. Biggest downside, of course, is that it would be difficult to sew the Micro:Bit into a project. You can loop through these holes, but you'd need to be careful not to overlap on the other pins on the edge connector. So while it is possible, you may need to get a little creative with attaching it to your wearables project.

But as far as the board itself, it's the most powerful board that we're talking about today. It's low cost, and it's easy to implement, and it can be programmed four different ways, just like the Gemma can, and there's so much documentation and resources out there available for the Microbit.

A couple boards that we didn't talk about today that are worth mentioning is the Adafruit Flora, which is very similar to the LilyPad, just a little bit smaller, and the Circuit Playground Express, which is very similar in function to the Micro:Bit, but in a circular sewable platform with some kind of more fun-focused sensors and lights and things on it. So if you're looking for more wearables boards, those are worth looking into. These three are our first recommendations for boards to get."Sure, here is the formatted text:

"your wearables or e-textiles project off the ground. Thanks for watching."