Bat gloves in progress

Last Autumn I started playing around with Tony Messina’s Simple Bat Detector circuit. I made a few boards and got as far as sticking one of them in an mp3 player armband …before the local bat population went into hibernation!

After being in the park one evening recently with bats swooping low overhead, I decided it was time to dig out the circuits again and get them tested and used.

Over the winter I’ve only been able to test with the ultra-sonic rangefinder I use in my sonar goggles, so I knew the circuit works, but I needed to see if it worked with airborne moving targets!

Simple bat detector

I rehoused the armband detector into something more sturdy and finally managed to coordinate with dusk and dry(ish) weather the other night to give it it’s first testing in the field.

It works!

I wandered around the park the other evening and found a bat flightpath that was conveniently located above a bench. I was able to use the detector to pick up a few clicks each time the bats zipped past. A really nice moment of making the invisible audible. If you know what I mean.

Bat gloves in progress

Meanwhile, however, I’m really unhappy with the crystal earpiece as the interface through which to experience this somewhat magical thing, so I’ve been working with some soft circuit techniques to develop some bat gloves.

There’s still a lot of sewing to do and, I expect, quite a lot of testing down at the park as well, but I’m really happy with the early experiments and how these transform the whole interaction.

That’s all I’m going to say for now…

Reflective armband teardown

A quick teardown of a Poundland reflective armband, because I’m doing wearable electronics on the cheap at the moment and this has got a few useful components inside…

Flashing and reflective armband, from in amongst the cycle stuff in Poundland. Comes in silver and fluorescent yellow. I've also seen a variant of the packaging that's orange.

Elasticated Velcro strap attached to reflective band with 4 LEDs mounted along its length. Click the switch once to make the LEDs flash, a second time to have them on continuously and a third time to switch them off.

What you get when you open it up...

You can liberate a fair bit of Velcro from the strap. Elastic is also used to make a pouch to hold the battery.

The momentary switch isn't much to look at (you were going to wrap it in fabric anyway, weren't you?) but it makes a good click when you operate it. Nice feedback.

The battery clip is minimal, but does the job... Also it has a battery in it!

The battery clip is also the main PCB. You can remove the wires and connect your circuit to either of the corner tabs (+ve) and Vss (-ve/GND)

I used the battery and battery clip to power the LEDs from 3 bike lights in this superhero cuff project. The velcro and elastic were re-used as a strap to hold it in place and the switch was used to trigger the different flashing patterns for the LEDs.