Make Every Week: Heartbeat LEDs

Visualizing one’s heartbeat is just cool. I’ve been into the idea since I learned that signals sent by the Polar heart monitor straps joggers use can be detected with a cheap device.

I’ve made a heartbeat hoodie, which was a lot of fun. But in the end, a bright, flashing sweatshirt starts to annoy the people around you. Now I’m working toward a more wearable wearable, one that changes subtly as my heart beats faster or slower.

This week I took a step on the way to that wearable by getting three LEDs — blue, green and yellow — to light up according to my heart rate. A calm heartbeat and blue glows, a little faster and you get green and really fast lights the yellow one.

Make, Map, Blink: A Cooking Class

Starting this week, I'm teaching Make, Map, Blink, a course at the New School university in Manhattan. It's an evening of cooking up data-driven projects -- both on the table and on the screen.

The course is a little quirky in a few ways, including that any New School student can attend: It's held in the cafeteria in the Eugene Lang building every Wednesday night at 7 p.m.

For those of you who can't attend (or aren't New School students), all of the course material, code and slides are posted in this Github repository. A link there also will sit on the left rail of this blog.