One Man Electrical Parade Halloween Costume

This year I wanted to do something interesting for Halloween using an Arduino and a bunch of LED lights. Initially, there wasn't really a theme behind it all, but then I came up with the idea of basing my costume on Disney's Electrical Parade. Ya, that's the ticket! So, I did a lot of research on the net and ordered a bunch of parts and managed to hack this project together a couple of hours at a time over the course of 3 weeks.

Step 1 Prepare 64 ping pong balls

Ping pong balls? Well, I've seen a number of people use ping pong balls as diffusers for LEDs. A little LED lighting up wouldn't have the visual impact of a glowing ping pong ball so this was the way to go.

I ordered a gross of cheap ping pong balls off the net. If I were to do it again, I'd probably order balls which were actually suitable for playing. These were definately "craft" quality balls at best. I'm guessing that better balls would have acted as better diffusers. These worked pretty well nevertheless.

First I found a screw with a nice sharp point. I then poked a little hole in the ball just to get the final hole started. Then I took a 3/16 drill bit and manually twisted it into the tiny hole to make it just large enough to put the tip of the LED into the ball while the base of the LED kept the whole LED from going into the ball.

Ok, just do this 64 times. (The grid of LEDs will be 8 by 8)

Comments

[Silentwolf2004]

OMG....Make It Stop !!!!! lol

[arduinoe]

your amp probably wont go 5 seconds with those things attached . what you hear as music is actually your amplifier screaming in pain !! way too many amps for a small little amplifier like that

[alex-sharetskiy]

not true it depends on the impedance of the speakers

[varocha]

well my friend good job!!!! you have a good future!!! weel you come from? how much money do you spend? I hope see you online soon !

[Berserk87]

you and a camera person standing there for 5 minutes, haha. looks awesome.

[Radioactive_Legos]

This is amazing! Great job!

[techiebot]

I remember when the Electrical Parade first premiered at Disneyland. This is a creative idea. I would also love to see the whole costume. Could you use Zigbee wireless transmitters to coordinate several costumes? That could be amazing!!!

[nejo0017]

It's great! Could you update the instructable with the wearable costume?!? I would love to see it.

[Kiteman]

Excellent project - it would be nice if you embedded the youtube video in the last step, though, instead of just the link.

[sr1sws]

Wow!