Power Laces- the Auto lacing shoe

Step 7 Adding some electronics to the motor shield

Is your soldering iron still warm?  Time to add some of the bells and whistles.

As you can see in the pics, I tested the components and programing with a breadboard attached.  Since I've done the heavy lifting you can skip this part, but it doesn't hurt to double check before everything is set in place.

After the program is uploaded (posted at the end of the instrutable) we can permanently mount the parts.  First, we solder a resistor and to one pin of the LED and a length of wire to both pins.

That assembly is then pushed through an unused shoelace socket, and the wires are ran to the Arduino, using hot glue to keep everything in place and out of the way.  Make sure you know which of the wires goes to the positive pin of the LED!

The Force sensor is mounted next.  Soldering is not advised as the plastic may melt, so I wrapped some wire around the leads and hot glued them into place.  The sensor was then glued and duct taped into the bottom of the shoe, right where my heel would rest.

The wires, also glued and taped into place, go up the back of the shoe and to the Arduino.

Finally, after we grab another resistor and a bit of medium gauge wire, we can begin soldering everything into place:

1. The positive wire of the LED goes to digital pin 2.

2. One force sensor wire (doesn't matter which) is soldered to +5v.

3. The other force sensor wire goes to Analog Pin 0.

4. Also connected to Ana. Pin 0 is a resistor.  The other end of the resistor goes to Ground.

5. Also connect the negative LED pin to Ground.  

6. A four inch spiral wrap of wire is soldered to Analog Pin 5.  This is the touch switch- touching this wire firmly will cause the servo motors to move into the unlocked position.

7. Finally, plug in the servo motors, making sure to get the orientation right.  My Arduino sketch assumes the left (looking from the back) servo is plugged into the right most servo pin, though this can easily be changed in the software.

The electronics are finished!