Costumes rule. Glowing costumes rule even more. To make the king of glowy costumes - you gotta look just one place...inside your computer :). By following this instructable, you'll have the knowledge and ability to make an LED lit garment that looks just like the ones in the new Tron flick.
My goals in making this costume were to make a robust, easily washable, waterproof, Tron style suit which was energy efficient to minimize battery weight and hardware bulk. To do that, I had to dodge the commonly used EL wire implementations and switch to LEDs.
Even if you aren't interested in making a Tron suit, I would highly recommend reading the section on lighting implementation - I did not individually stitch each LED with conductive thread...instead I used a combination of silicone coated LED strips and faux leather to produce a beautiful, diffuse light without seeing those pesky LED points.
My goals in making this costume were to make a robust, easily washable, waterproof, Tron style suit which was energy efficient to minimize battery weight and hardware bulk. To do that, I had to dodge the commonly used EL wire implementations and switch to LEDs.
Even if you aren't interested in making a Tron suit, I would highly recommend reading the section on lighting implementation - I did not individually stitch each LED with conductive thread...instead I used a combination of silicone coated LED strips and faux leather to produce a beautiful, diffuse light without seeing those pesky LED points.
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Signing UpStep 1: Other Lighting Options - Why not use EL Wire?
Most Tron-ish garmets are made with this stuff called EL wire or EL tape (which is based on the same technology). Although EL technologies are great for a lot of reasons, I feel that they aren't very well suited to wearable apps. I built an old school Tron suit using EL wire, and found the following problems with it:
- EL Wire is super fragile! Bending it too tightly or repeated bending motions (i.e. wrapping around body joints or placing into a washing machine) will cause the EL wire to fail. And when you try to repair any EL wire damage, you quickly find out that...
- EL Wire repair isn't pretty! To repair EL wire, you splice in solid non-glowing wire to the broken sections...which completely destroys the effect of a single, unbroken line.
- EL Wire is pretty dim! You won't be able to see EL glow at all during the day, which leads to the next problem...
- EL Wire looks lame if its not illuminated! You can get fancy and do some work to hide EL wire, but in general, unlit EL wire looks like just that - wires on the outside of a garment. So, if its not glowing, its generally pretty ugly.
- You need an AC inverter for mobile applications! EL wire runs on AC current, and any battery pack you can buy will be DC. Therefore, you need to add more bulky hardware, and there are more things to break while wearing your creation!
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- Nikhil studying in 10th
Specs...
Colour: Orange/blue/green and white
Quantity: Two of each including each one's 2xAA battery case.
Driver: smallest multimode switch (eg.fast flash,slow flash you know what i mean...)
Hope this make it easier...
Cheers!!
If you could send the stuff over that will be great, still need some help getting them...
Hey Man, that awesome stuff !!!!
At my location (Pacific) its a bit hard to get access to EL wires..
Just wondering to see if it would be possible to send me some orange/green/blue wires..
please send me a quick reply so we could discuss the costs....
I am working on a project thats the lst key factor to completing it...
Have you got this sorted yet? Let me know if you need my help getting this stuff over there..
SMA
I ended up using around 400 LED's for part of my costume, the glowing cloak. Thankfully, the entire thing didn't have to glow, just the bottom third.
I bought 2 strips of lights, one from Ebay and one from Amazon. I sheathed each strip of lights in sections, in 2 layers of fabric, stitched into tubes. The tubes hang from the inner most layer of my cloak. I originally tried to stitch the tubes to the cloak directly, but hot gluing the tubes with dots of hot glue allowed me better ability to space them appropriately and allow for flexibility. On top of that is layered soft interfacing, very loosely folded to help spread the light. on top of that is a blue translucent material that I painted lines on with fabric paint to block part of the light. I cut the strips into several sections to make the light spread evenly, and to make sure as many strips as possible faced forward (reverse from yours, but it works better for my purposes)
It was heavy as hell, but still not too heavy to swish around, and no worse than a thick comforter.
I found a portable lithium ion battery that performed beautifully, and is mounted in a sling on my back that I was able to access easily to turn off when not posing to conserve power. The battery has both a 9 volt and a 12 volt option, so I could set it to the higher output when I knew I wasn't going to be out as long.
I submitted this costume as part of a CNN ireport, and they had me pose for them at DragonCon :D
Thanks so much for your tutorial, I don't think i could have done it without some of your suggestions!
1) The LEDs are under the black leather pieces
2) The LEDs face your *body*, not the shirt
So, the glow is made by scattering the LED light off your skin. If you just put the LEDs under the shirt, you'll see a whole bunch of different points of light, not a nice, diffuse glow.
Mind you, I know very little about this stuff. Just trying to create a cool costume! Thanks!
I have a sheet of cloth backed vinyl and was hoping to attacht it to a cotton shirt, Will the iron adhesive be strong enough? or should i look at fabric glues?
or a program that i can use to view and scale the images?
http://www.christmas-light-source.com/White-Micro-Drop-LED-Battery-Operated-Light-Set-_p_2039.html
http://www.christmaslightsetc.com/p/Battery-Operated-Micro-Fairy-LED-Lights-18-Blue-Lamps-4-Spacing-Green-Wire-40111.htm
http://www.christmaslightsetc.com/p/Battery-Operated-Christmas-Wide-Angle-Lens-20-White-LED-Lamps-4-inch-Spacing-Green-Wire--19256.htm
A suggestion- has anyone looked into side-emitting waterproof LED strips? They seem to exist for indoor 'architecture' lighting, i.e. my first search result may have the LEDs a bit spaced out but still looks pretty good: http://aptlight.com/productsview.php?id=90&proid=118
I actually looked at side emitters too :). They *might* work. You'd have to do some experimenting with how far away from the white sections of the garment they'd be placed. This was my problem - too close to the see through part, you'd see points of light. Too far away, you'd see nothing. There may be a happy medium that I didn't take enough time to discover.
BTW, the strips I used were made for cars, so waterproofness is easy:
http://www.oznium.com/side-emitting-led-strip