Animated Glow Fur Neopixel Scarf Tutorial

So, this is exciting.

I've been invited to become a contributor to the Adafruit Learning Center -- Adafruit's online shop is where I buy most of the supplies for all the light-up costumes I've been making lately.

Adafruit's tutorial style is right up my alley.  They have a good number of beginner-friendly projects and a lot of the guides focus on LED wearables and cosplay.  The firewalker shoes and sparkle skirt tutorials are what got me all excited and interested in making LED costumes in the first place, and the Arduino lessons and project ideas made it actually possible.  I've opened up a whole new world of fun and learned so much this past year and I'm super excited and grateful to be able to contribute to the site that got me here.

My first tutorial was just published yesterday: Animated Neopixel Glow Fur Scarf

Check it out.  It's a pretty easy project -- beginner level sewing and beginner level soldering, with copy-and-paste-able Arduino code that I made pretty easy to customize.  I'm extremely proud of it.

Let me know if you make one!

Read More

Silver Glow Fur Jacket

Today I finished my first glow-fur project.  It's a glowing silver-and-white fur lined jacket, and the cuffs and collar fur glow with delicious rainbow colors and animations.

I used Adafruit's Gemma chip along with their neopixels and neopixel strips.  The jacket is powered by a lithium polymer battery that's surprisingly light and really strong.  I think I'm hooked on lithium polymer.  This thing is awesome.

This jacket was kind of a nightmare to make.  Electronics can be so petulant if they don't get exactly what they want, when they want it, and prototypes are notoriously fiddly anyway even without the electricity to muddle things up.  I remade almost every part of this jacket at least twice, and I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, but I am 500% HAPPY with it.

The cool thing about using the Adafruit pixels is that each one is individually addressable.  What does that mean?  It means that I can plug this jacket into my Mac, and tell it what color combinations I want, or what animations it should run, or how bright it should be or any number of wonderful things.  If I want it fading from purple to red to purple I can do that, or I can let the rainbow colors shine.  

I've also got the option of adding on motion sensors, color sensors, or GPS sensors (so I can have it light up when I get to Starbucks, or whatever - I haven't quite figured out the why's of that one yet).  There's so much to learn.  It's a little overwhelming. 

But right now I have a sparkly rainbow light up jacket.  Squee!

Read More