Introduction: Intel Edison Smart Wearable Baby Pacifier - Part 2

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This tutorial is Part 2 of the 4BaBi group submission to the Intel IoT London Roadshow 2015. Here we show you how to construct a Smart Baby Pacifier using the Intel Edison board, Seeed Grove IoT Starter Kit.

For the full details on Part 1 or our submission please see:

Instructables - Intel Edison Smart Wearable Baby Monitor

The devices in Part 1 and Part 2 are meant to work together in order to deliver the ideal real-time smart monitor for infants and young children (ages 6 months - 3 years)

Step 1: Pick Your Pacifier

Picking a pacifier is no easy task, we had no idea where to go to get this stuff or what a good pacifier was if we saw one.

We began our search for the pacifier in Toys R Us, where we managed to find a set of 2 for a very reasonable price. Some things to consider when buying a pacifier for this project:

  1. Get more than one - you're likely to make a mistake and break one of them. We were performing this in a hackathon and its not called a hackathon for nothing!
  2. Find a Capacitive Nib - If like us you plan on using a touch sensor of some sort instead of a press button, make sure to test that the Nib is slightly conductive. This test can be performed by using it agains your smart phone touch screen.
  3. Holes for Sensors - There will be a dense amount of sensors attached to this small piece of plastic. If it has a few holes in it already its less cutting to worry about later when it comes to assembling the pacifier into a recognisable shape.

For those interested in repeating our design in exactly the same way, you can find the pacifiers (or dummies) we used right here.

Step 2: Get Wired Up

This step is not too different from Part 1, whereby all the required sensors are attached to the Edison Arduino Shield and registered within the software to start taking samples.

Step 3: Admire the Challenge

This step is self explanatory.

Step 4: Get It Together

Once you have all the pieces together the process of compacting it all into he small pacifier shape begins. In order to help you get this job done you'll probably need the following tools:

  1. Scalpel - resize those big boards to fit inside the Nib and or through the holes of the Pacifier.
  2. Cable cutters - shorten those wires to get everything connected.
  3. Glue Gun - Use this wise tool to get everything put together.
  4. Metal Nail File - get rid of the sharp dangerous edges. (warning to not test on actual baby!)

Step 5: Upload Your Code!

The last thing you need to do is get your coding together so that all the sensors begin to display some form of output for testing. In our case we programmed it to do the following:

  • Flash a Blue LED = Touch Sensor activated
  • Flash a Red LED = Sensor is in the babies mouth (ie not fallen out)
  • RGB transition = in order to visually perceive the temperature from the sensor we used the same temperature ranges as on Part 1. This was a great way to see if and how things were working.