Adafruit Flora Disco Ball Mitten Rave Gloves

Party On! With the lights on and where we can see your hands, Mister...

Here is a quick build on a light up gloves which was an after dinner project to squeeze one in before the contest deadlines.  The concept is here for anyone to improve upon.

The light up gloves use an Adafruit Flora arduino variant.  The lighting device is an Adfruit Neopixel ring which contains 16 individually addressable RGB LED elements.

Ooo, and that shiny disco ball fabric is just fabulous.

Make these cool gloves to have fun for use in the clubs, at home, or anywhere, especially in Colorado.

DISCLAIMER: This is not a completed project by any means but serves as inspiration for other makers to make. Those that make, do. Those that can't , make doo-doo. So what, give it a shot.

Step 1: Get a Handle on Materials...

So I won a pair of Betabrand socks from one of the Instructables contests.  The design I selected was out of stock so they offered me  a gift certificate instead.  I've got plenty of socks to make this and this... Yes, I still have a pair.  So I decided to use that to help get a batch of Betabrand brand Disco Open Source Project Disconium.  That is their disco mirror ball like shiny fabric material.  It is their softwear development kit they have where you get a 2 yard swatch of Disconium fabric to experiment with.  I really haven't thought about using it until now.

You need some liner gloves.  These just happen to be some knit utility gloves.  You can omit the use of liner gloves if you just want a thin pair of gloves.

You need to have a microprocessor board of some sort to contol some LEDs to light up your gloves.  I am repurposing my Adafruit Flora which is designed to be sewn into wearable articles of fine technology and fashion.

Sewing and soldering are good skills to learn and practice.  Remember, there are sharp and pointy things involved, be safe.

Step 2: Of Glove...

Look up any instructable on how to make a real pair of gloves. I didn't.

I started out to make a shell of a glove.  The liner gloves would just fit inside and I could pack the electronics between the layers.

I traced around a folded over piece of material and wanted to mark where the Vs of the fingers go.

It was black fabric so I didn't have a light colored pencil or anything to mark the material.  I tried to use the white-out correction tape but that wouldn't stick.  The brat felt sorry for me and finally offered her piece of tailor's chalk to use.

I then tried to sew a single straight stitch around the outline of the glove.  OK, this may work since the seams were pretty much close to the line with minimal seam allowance.  The entire glove would be flipped inside out when I cut the finger webs apart.

The I decided to go over the seams with a reinforcing zig-zag stitch.  That took up too much seam allowance and made the glove too small to fit the fingers in the fingers, much less with a liner glove on.

Step 3: Plan B...

So FAIL on making the glove.

The thumb kinda fit and the pinky fit.  The other fingers just didn't work.  So I decided to lop them off and use it as is.  The other hand was sewn around the outline of the hand to form a mitt shape.  I left that as is.  I think with real gloves, you may have to piece together the rest of the fingers with more material.  There just isn't enough material to manipulate to get it to fit around the middle fingers.

Anyway...

The Adafruit Flora with the Neopixel Ring is programmed with the sample goggles sketch from their product tutorial.  I just played around with the delay settings there to speed up the animation giving it the disco flash flash.

I just stuffed the electronics into the one glove. Sew it in place to keep it from moving around. You would need another board for the other hand.  Lithium polymer or Li-po battery packs would reduce the bulk.  You can even try this with the Adafruit Gemma or Trinket (Attiny85 based) microprocessor boards which are even smaller than the Flora. 

I guess I could have made the lights sound-reactive since I have the microphone breakout board too.

You can make an overmitt or a glove shell.  Make a cool hot oven mitt with the firewalker code and neopixel strips.

MJ would be proud.  I think.