The Chinese company Giayee is crowdfunding this project

Aug 12, 2014 06:44 GMT  ·  By

Customers might not be purchasing a lot of wearables these days, but there’s sure a lot of hype around them. Device makers are avidly trying to populate the niche and each week we see the advent of several smartwatches and fitness bracelets.

But if you’re not really impressed with the Samsung Gear Live or Gear 2 Neo or LG G Watch, maybe you’d prefer the opportunity of creating your own wearable device.

Of course, building such a thing from scratch is not an easy task, and your tech savvy levels should be quite elevated for you to be successful in this project.

But Chinese device maker Giayee, known so far for its Android tablets, thin clients and mini PCs, is here to help. Their latest effort is called the Atomware, which is a little DIY Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) development kit based on the Nordic nRF51822.

Basically, the Atomware brings all the basic goodies you need to build your own smart bracelet. The kit arrives complete with things such as a battery charger, accelerometer, gyroscope, OLED display, heart rate monitor plus a control module with status LEDs.

If the team behind the project manages to raise up to CAD$12,000 / $10,968 / €8,202 on Kickstarter by the time we reach September 18, you will be able to pick up an Atomware kit of your own for only CAD$45 / $41 / €31.

Adopters of the Atomware will be provided with a base board with 6 24-pin headers, which will allow users to arrange the modules in whatever manner they choose. If 6 modules aren't enough for you, you can always connect another board to the original one and get more.

The project is completely open source and the first versions of the firmware and software are already available on github.

Giayee will also make available an Android (for the time being, there’s no mention of iOS) demo app in Java in order to showcase how to use their API. Possible applications could include pedometers, motion trackers, gesture recognition apps and much more.

On top of that, if you decide to back this project up on Kickstarter, the company promises it will email you the hardware designs in order to encourage you to develop upon their project.

At the time of writing this article, there are still 37 days to go before the campaign comes to an end. If successful, DIY-ers can expect to see their wearable kits ship out starting November 2014.

Atomware DIY Kit for Wearables (7 Images)

Atomware kit allows you to build your own wearable
Atomware kit allows you to build your own wearableAtomware kit allows you to build your own wearable
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