By - Mad_z

 

So why is it that whenever i get a Lilypad in my hands I spontaneously feel the need to be creative?

A lot of parts come through the Little Bird Warehouse but I always make time to play with the Lilypad gear.    Just looking at the boards, project ideas just spring into existence!

These two boards are pretty much the same thing:

The oh so sexy Lilypad Accelerometer

Sparkfun - Triple axis accelerometer  (not quite so sexy)....more utilitarian

The moment I see the Lilypad accelerometer I think - "yes!  I can make a shirt .....that a dragon boater could wear....that as they move their arm....an LED lights up....changing colour depending on how fast their stroke is....or how much power is behind it......or that beeps out the rhythm!....i wonder if i will get zapped when the shirt gets wet...maybe a nice coating for it"  

The other accelerometer just makes me think...."that belongs in the box with the other  SEN-09269....better check stock levels are right"   (a far less exciting train of thought)

Anyway,  this whole rant was inspired by this article by Benjamin Mako Hill 

"On Feminism and Microcontrollers"

 Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad's appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.

We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).

Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren't just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad's design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects."