Some doubts: Lilypad Arduino, Accelerometers and E-textiles integration

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hello all!

First of all, I'm a brazilian undergraduate Design student, and I'm very new at developing electronic projects (specially with e-textiles). I'm currently working on a malleable hand-held interface for my graduation project, and have been posting its development at this website: http://theinstrumentproject.tumblr.com/

Well, I've come up with the attached simplified schematics (just to communicate my needs and current intentions), and some questions raised from it:

About Arduino and the schematic:

  • Will the raw data of the whole schematic (5 accelerometers to lilypad to bluetooth) be fast enough generated? - a frequency of 10 "readings" per second should be enough for what I intend to do with them. (*)

  • How much power will the schematic consume? Are three 20mm coin cell batteries going to do the job? In how much time would they be drown out? (*)

About soft circuits and e-textiles:

  • What is best to transport data and power through this interface: conductive fabric, conductive thread or even a really thin wire? - It is important that it could be folded, twisted and very resistant through time.

  • Could you indicate any kind of textile more suitable for this application? - It should be just a little stretchy, and very resistant.

  • Any ideas of how should I protect the components from damage by rough hand manipulation?

  • Any advice about sewing the whole application?

(*) Here are the links to the main components I intend to buy:

Hope someone here can bring me some light to these problems, but any kind of help, opinion or critic is welcome!

Thanks!

instrument-simple-schematic-01.jpg
instrument-simple-schematic-01.jpg1100×626 118 KB

instrument-simple-schematic-02.jpg
instrument-simple-schematic-02.jpg1100×626 112 KB

instrument-simple-schematic-03.jpg
instrument-simple-schematic-03.jpg1100×626 114 KB

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Will the raw data of the whole schematic (5 accelerometers to lilypad to bluetooth) be fast enough generated? - a frequency of 10 "readings" per second should be enough for what I intend to do with them.

So all the arduino has to do is take readings from the accelerometers and output the readings on bluetooth ?
Have you tried any experiments? If you have an arduino you could send a pattern over bluetooth to measure the data rate you can achieve. If you have one accelerometer you can just read it five times and do some tests like that.

3

radman:
So all the arduino has to do is take readings from the accelerometers and output the readings on bluetooth ?
Have you tried any experiments? If you have an arduino you could send a pattern over bluetooth to measure the data rate you can achieve. If you have one accelerometer you can just read it five times and do some tests like that.

Thanks for your reply! And yep, that's exactly it!
I would really be glad to test this, however, this is actually the main problem. As I'm brazilian, and here we don't have much access to such components, acquiring these products takes lots of time and money - and at the moment I don't have neither of them. So, I just need for now to minimize my risks, and see if someone with experience with these components could give me a little help.

I've just updated the post with links to the Sparkfun pages of the components.