Hello and welcome to Project Lux!

Project Lux is a dress with integrated LED's. This dress has several ways of interaction with the wearers surroundings, and simple interactions. This includes temperature, light and sound. The dress also has a couple of generic light modes that cycle between rainbows, a heartbeat and color pulse, that can all be selected with a simple button press on the dress itself. On top of that the dress also comes with an app that lets you control the preferred color lights via your phone. The dress is fully portable, so you do not have to stand near a wall socket all day long.

Step 1: Needed Components

In order to build projecct lux you will need the following components.

1. a 5 meter rgb led strip
2. arduino uno
3. a led shield
4. a sound sensor
5. a photo transistor
6. a button module
7. a temperatur sensor
8. wires
9. lithium cell batterys
10. a hc-05 bluetooth module
11. a dress
12. sewing material
13. cloth
14. soldering equipement
15. velcro
16. arduino uno mounting bracket

Step 2: Wiring

Wire your arduino and censors up according to the following picture:

Make sure to follow it correctly, or else you may fry your censors.

Tip! Think ahead of were you would like to place the censors on the dress. Making your wires too long could cause them to hang underneath the dress and would give a messy look. I recommend to attach the censors in such a way you, or the LED lights do not affect them. Attach the heat censor on the bottom of the dress so your body heat does not affect the outcome, and attach the light censor not to close to the light of the LED strip.

Step 3: Batteries

In order to make the dress fully portable you will need batteries. To supply the 12v led strip with enough power you will need quite a large battery, these however can get pretty heavy and unwieldy, I solved this problem in the following way.I used 16 old 18650 Lithium batteries to supply the dress with enough power to last a couple of hours. I soldered 4 of them in series and wrapped them up with some tape. Soldering them in series ups the voltage from 2.7 volts to 12 volts approximately, which is perfect for the led strip we are using for this project. I then soldered a long wire to the battery pack with a xt60 male plug at the end. I made 4 of these battery packs in total.Later I soldered 4 female xt60 plugs to a single 5.5mm plug that fits in the arduino uno, this way it is possible to attach the 4 battery packs to the arduino to supply it with power. I used the xt60 plugs to make it possible to decouple the battery packs and quickly swap them when one is empty or when you want to wash the dress and remove all the components.

DO WATCH OUT, these packs are 12v so any sensor or small electrical parts that touch the positive wire will fry really quickly, i lost a bluetooth module that way :(

Step 4: Sowing

Now sow some pockets on the bottom of the dress to store the batteries. Make sure you sow the pockets on the front and sides of the dress, to prevent sitting on the batteries. I recommend you to add little press buttons to the pockets to completely prevent the batteries from falling out while jumping, running or sitting down.

More sowing will be necessary to make sure the LEDs will stay in place. First get some Velcro and cut it the same width as your LED strip. Now sow one side of the Velcro on the bottom outside of the dress, as seen in the intro pictures. Next, you want to glue the other side of the Velcro onto your LED strip.Now that the bottom of the dress is finished, you want to make sure the LEDs will flow correctly through the dress. Add some cloth loops inside the dress to guide your LED though the dress. The way you want it to flow inside the dress is up to you.

Now comes the less fun part. Cable management and censor placement. It is important you did the wiring before you do the sowing, so you will know the exact length of the cables.

Every censor in this kit has a flat bottom, wicht will make it eazy for us to glue the press buttons onto them. However, the censors conduct electrisety, so they cannot come in direct contact with the censors. instead, glue a small piece of fabric onto the censor first, and then add the press button. This way, the censors will be 100% safe.

Now add the bottom half of the press button to the desired place inside the dress. Please keep in mind what i said bevore, make sure you place them in such a way you do not sit on them, and their reading will not be invluenced bu the light from your dress or your body heat.

Now sow the mounting bracket onto the disired spot in the dress. make sure you do not place it to low. The pins from the arduino take up a lot of space and will be sure to hang low, seeing the fact that you cannot really bend them to harsh.

and

Step 5: Coding

If you have wirded everything up correctly the following code should work just fine. I added the code as an arduino ide file that can be uploaded to the arduino like any other script would. I commented some of the stuff i did in the code so it's easier for you to read.

I also made a android app using app inventor 2. The app is also downloadable here. You can connect to the hc-05 module using the bluetooth on your phone, once you have connected to it once your phone will recognise it for later. When you open the app you can press the big manuel buttons, there was supposed to be a automatic mode but i didnt make that one in time whoops.

Now you can connect the app to the dress by pressing the connect button on the top of the screen, then select the hc-05 bluetooth device to pair with. After that you can tap on the rgb color wheel, then the leds will light up in that color.