Android Developer Conference kicked off today in San Francisco. This four-day event plays host to hundreds of Android experts, and dozens of companies hoping to spread the word about their solutions. The conference is filled with technical sessions, and we sat in on a few to see what the buzz was about.

First, we stopped in on Rachel Lyra-Hospodar's talk “What are Wearables? Android Meets Arduino.” After Google announced in May that it was making the new Arduino-based ADK available to Android developers to help them build hardware to work with Android phones, the popular Arduino micro-controller platform went from popular prototyping platform to powerful Android extension tool.

In her talk, Lyra-Hospodar examined the world of Arduino-based wearable electronics and computing. She's been a seamstress for years, but said that she started working with Arduino when she decided to integrated electronics into her clothing.

Lyra-Hospodar went on to demonstrate a dozen different Arduino tools, and to show off conductive threads, ribbons and even felt. Buried in all of those neat toys were dozens of links to resources for new Arduino developers. Among those links were The Processing IDE, the Amarino Toolkit for working with BlueTooth, and further tools from MIT.

“A microcontroller is basically a tiny computer. It can only do one thing at a time, but it can count and track events, which is a lot. There are lots of different types of Arduino in a lot of different form factors. This stuff used to be really esoteric, but not anymore. There are a lot of libraries, now. There are a lot of different microcontrollers besides Arduino, too. Arduino's great for prototyping because it's very flexible, and once you decide what you want to do, there's usually a very specific chip for that which you can use instead in your final product,” said Lyra-Hospodar.

Lyra-Hospodar also touched on the state of conductive threads and materials. “These fabrics have properties which are documented. There are conductive fabrics, there are resistive fabrics. I've done projects where you rely on the fabric being a bad conductor. You can also knit with it, so you can make a stretch variable resistance thing. There's a project where someone made conductive felt by taking conductive thread and shredding it. There is ribbon with ends that are solderable, and the rest of it is flexible.

Lyra-Hospodar also referenced bare-skin safe ink which is conductive. She said that such ink can be used to power LEDs, and said she's seen a demonstration where “they painted it on people, then completed circuits by touching each other.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Lyra-Hospodar's talk was the fact that she is not an expert programmer. She said that she is a seamstress, originally, but the wealth of existing libraries, examples, and tutorials on the Web enabled her to learn about microcontrollers on her own. Specifically, she said that the Arduino IDE has a large amount of sample code included, and that she typically cobbles together her wearable electronics software from these samples.

That doesn't mean she's not still encountering difficulties in her work. “Signal processing is really hard,” she said while discussing her project to create a pair of pants with a keyboard embedded in the legs. “You software people need to help us with that.”

We'll post another entry later today with more talk summaries. Incidentally, the image at the top of this post is the Arduino-controller Northpaw, a project Lyra-Hospodar mentioned in her talk. It's a device you strap around your ankle, and it always vibrates towards north. After using the device for 2 days or so, your body adapts and ignores the vibrations, and instead presents the wearer with an innate sense of which way is north. It's like adding a sixth sense to the wearer.