Introduction: Light Up Geek Wear
This is really just a quick guide for inspiration in making cool stuff to wear that lights up.
You can incorporate LEDs as an attention grabbing visual element to any article of clothing.
Supplies
The basic element used is the LED throwie.
It is essentially just an LED that is connected by its bare leads to a coin cell battery to operate. You can look for the many instructables on LED throwies to learn more or read up on its legendary status in maker lore. It is also an introduction to electronics where you learn to create a basic circuit, learn about polarity and voltage to make the LED work. Learn to solder and extend the wires or add a switch to control a battery pack. Wire multiple LEDs together in series of parallel circuits for more points of light.
To get the basic blinking effect, I used candle flickering LEDs. These LEDs contain a controller chip that makes it blink or fade in and out repeatedly without the need for a more powerful microcontroller like those used for Arduino, etc.
When you need more LEDs or lights with more complex animations, you will need to use neopixels or addressable LEDs which require a microcontroller and maybe a bigger power supply. Multiple addressable LEDs are mounted in strips, rings, and matrices to form full on display boards.
I think it was the minimalist challenge to make something interesting with the least startup investment in new hardware or really just use whatever I had laying around that wasn't already embedded into something.
SO...I can do that with one LED...
Step 1:
If you don't have a geeky piece of clothing to modify, make one...
It can be whatever theme you are interested in. I had seen a lot of people were into the retro computer thing so it would be neat to create some gear along those lines.
A floppy disk drive hoodie is cool. A floppy disk drive hoodie with a flashing activity light is even cooler.
You can make the "patch" or base item as an actual fabric applique, a printed iron heat transfer, vinyl cutout, or just painted or drawn on to the garment. Find a friend with a Cricut or Silhouette machine or gear for sublimation printing.
The LED is just placed under the fabric and secured with tape or sewn in. The fabric should diffuse the LED a little bit but you can control the light bleed or excess glow around by blocking in and masking with electrical tape or additional layers of dark fabric or supple vinyl.
Step 2:
The running lights on the retro 8080 computer had three rows of lights.
I had three identical strips of neopixels that was wired up to one pin driving a firelike animation.
The strips were mounted offset to each other a bit to give the random flashing light animation that you would see running on a retro computer panel.
The heart beat hoodie is just the long strip laid out in the shape of the heartbeat EKG graph. I could have gotten sharper breaks in the shape but that would have required cutting the strip and soldering extension wires to facilitate a sharp bend. You could really expand on this project by connecting to real pulse sensors or have it react to other sensors or feeds. This would easily adapt to being a sound reactive meter/ color organ.
Step 3:
The flux capacitor is again three short strips of neopixels connected to one pin of the microcontroller. It makes coding simpler as the flashes of light just all simultaneously eminate from the center.
The Javelin Missile hoodie exhaust trail is a neopixel strip with some fluffed up fiberfill batting covering it. It serves to diffuse the neopixels and to look like the smoke coming out of the rocket motor.
Step 4: Bonus Builds
RAWR!!! Something in a fierce pandemic fashion...
or more mellow at the hop...
stand clear of the closing doors...
boom... blackout/scrim cloth and light blocking silhouettes...
Mascots. It's lit!
May the fourth...
There be dragons...
Participated in the
Wearables Challenge
