Wearable systems · mobile + embedded
Jacket Link
A BLE-connected garment that makes a connected phone and attached keyring legible through light and sound—and lets the jacket and phone call one another.
The question
How can a garment reduce the small, repeated friction of leaving without critical items without becoming another screen to check? The interface needed to be quick, physical, and understandable at a glance.
What I built
I designed and fabricated a jacket with a Circuit Playground Bluefruit, an external three-pixel light strip, a capacitive soft control, and a key-loop sensor. A five-second status view or an always-on hardware mode reports the phone and key state through colored lights and audio feedback.
Two-way locating
The jacket advertises a custom BLE service with separate notify and sound-command characteristics. Pressing the jacket’s left button triggers a phone-side alert; pressing the companion app’s control sends a command back to the garment to play a locating tone. The Android implementation handles BLE permissions, foreground connection status, reconnection, and notification delivery rather than treating the app as a static mock-up.
Design and iteration
The project began with a wallet-RFID direction, but the final garment intentionally focused on the more reliable phone and key interactions. The garment pattern was traced and fitted from a favorite jumpsuit; fabric, pocket placement, conductive construction, and the control’s discreteness were part of the technical design rather than an enclosure added at the end.
Public boundary
This page documents the completed prototype and its interaction design. It does not claim general item localization: the final build reports Bluetooth connection for the phone and presence at the designated key loop. Wallet sensing remains a future iteration.