Show the world your heart

Have you ever felt that you want to show your heart to the world? Well, today we created a way for you to do just that.

We used a Neopixel ring with 61 individual addressable leds, an ESP8266 and a small heart rate sensor.

The led ring was a delight to program, Adafruit have made a super easy library.

#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(<numberOfLeds>, <pin>, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);  
...
   strip.begin();
...
  strip.setPixelColor(led, red, green, blue);
  strip.show();

As you can see, with only one include and four lines of code, you can set a specified pixel to your desired color.

After soldering and programming the ring, it lights up in beat with your heart rate, and it was time to make it a wearable object and to make it look cute, as well as being functional.

We ended up with sowing the ring into felt, shaped like a heart. We also disabled the pixels that were outside of the heart so that the pulsing light is confined within the bounds of the heart shape.

This heart can now be worn on your clothes, and the heart rate sensor must (unfortunately) be attached to your finger. The ESP is connected to WiFi and transmit your heartrate to an Azure Eventhub and then displayed in a dashboard that will be revealed in another blogpost ;)

For the judges:
with this peace of awesome wearable internet connected physical device, we submit this blog post in hopes of getting the following badges:

• Under construction - we made an awesome physical object.
• Wear me! - You can definitely wear this
• Dr. Who - If it stops blinking, you might be in serious trouble ;)