Vigekwear is a Modularized, Open source, Wearable BLE Development Kit (Crowdfunding)

[Update: Atomwear has been renamed to Vigekwear due to (Intel’s) copyrights infringement].

Giayee is a company mainly manufacturing Android tablets, thin clients, and mini PCs, but their latest product, called Atomwear, is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) development kit based on Nordic nRF51822 chipset that comes with various modules such as battery charger, accelerometer, gyroscope, OLED display, heart rate monitor, etc… which connect together via 24-pin connector on a standard rigid baseboard or a flexible printed circuit (FPC).

All modules are connected via the same 24-pin connector with power, I2C, SPI, UART, ADC, and GPIOs signals. The baseboard and FPC both contain 6 such connectors connected in parallel for up to 6 modules, and two baseboard can be connected together via a bridge circuit to accept more modules. The minimum configuration is with a BLE MCU module, and a power module.

The different boards and modules are listed as follows:

• Atomwear-BASE – Baseboard – Dimensions: 10x70mm
• Atomwear-MCU – BLE MCU board – Dimensions: 10x21mm. The brain of the system. It consists of Nordic nRF51822 BLE MCU, a button and two LEDs. The button is designed to switch working mode and two LEDs indicate working status. They can be defined by users.
• Atomwear-BAT – Battery module.  Dimensions: 10x20mm.  This module provides power supply for Atomwear via a 40 mAh battery, and indicated the battery level to the MCU. If you need more capacity severral Atomwear-BAT modules can be used.
• Atomwear-CHG – USB battery charge control module –  Dimensions – 10x13mm. Charge Atomwear via a Micro USB receptacle. There are two LEDs on this board (Green and Red) to indicate charging status.
• Atomwear-BAC – 3-axis digital accelerometer and barometric pressure sensor –  Dimensions – 10x10mm. The two sensors are connected on the same I2C bus with different device addresses, and they provide acceleration, barometric pressure, temperature and altitude data.
• Atomwear-MAG – Versatile 9DoF sensor module –  Dimensions – 10x10mm. This board contains a 3-axis gyro & 3-axis accelerometer (BMI055) and a 3-axis magnetometer (AK8963).
• Atomwear-OLED –  OLED display module –  Dimensions: 14x14mm.  Low power OLED module with 64×32 resolution.
• Atomwear-DBG – Debug port module.  Dimensions: 10X12mm. This module connects the SWD port and UART port from the 24-pin socket to 2.54mm pitch header.

The project will be fully open source, the first version of the firmware and software, top be used with Keil uVison4, is already available on github, and there should also be an Android (no iOS mentioned) demo app in Java to show how to use their API, but it’s not in github or I missed it. The company also promised to send all their hardware design files (schematic, board design) to their backers by email, and they encourage people to come up with their own modules.

Giayee has launched Atomwear Kickstarter campaign to raise $12,000 CAD or more to launch production. Pledges start at $45 CAD for the basic Atomwear kit with the MCU, debug, battery, MAG module, and baseboard. If you want a kit with the PFC and a rubber wristband, that is something you could actually wear, you’ll need to pledge $75 CAD which also includes the basic kit plus the OLED module. Shipping is free to Canada, and $15 CAD to anywhere else, with delivery scheduled for November 2014.

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