Week 7 – Project Proposal

Halloween is fast approaching, and costumes have been on my mind. While I’ve been thinking long and hard about getting a Suitjama, I’m afraid that in NYC that just might not cut it. It’s not quite flashy enough. It needs some dazzle. Perhaps… dazzling LEDs?

I’m not actually going to put LEDs on my Suitjama. But wearable LEDs (and electronics in general) have become more and more interesting to me the past few weeks. There are companies that specialize in LED clothing, and dancers have been experimenting with LEDs/rope lights. I particularly want to see Iluminate sometime soon.

For a first project, creating a full costume covered in LEDs would be rather ambitious (plus, I haven’t done much sewing since HomeEc in middle school). But I think a cape (like a superhero cape) would be easy to make, sewing-wise, and would still be really cool at parties.

The key words to use when researching this are “LED matrix.” It uses the same principles as the 3D LED cubes that have been posted before. There are two ways we could go about making this. The analog way is probably cheaper, but would be much more labor intensive, as we would have to individually wire each LED, in a grid pattern. The more expensive, but MUCH easier way would be to use these LED ribbons, found at Adafruit and elsewhere:

At $30 per meter, they’re not particularly cheap. I estimate I’d want around 10 meters, which brings the price down to $25/meter, but that’s still $250. However the time saved would be substantial, and far fewer wires to break. Additionally, Adafruit has a good tutorial available.

The tweak on the basic wearable LED outfit is that we would add a sound sensor, so the LEDs could respond to sound – I envision this working best in a club, where the lights can pulse in time with heavy bass sounds.

The primary components required include:
– LED ribbon(s)
– Arduino
– Battery power supply
– A case (beltpack?) for holding the components
– A base cloth for attaching the LED ribbons to
– A sheer cloth of the same size that is sewn onto the base cloth after all the components are attached and wired up. This hides the components and helps take some of the edge off the the LED lights.
– Possibly some conductive thread

Obviously it won’t be ready by Halloween this year. But there’s always next year…