Thanks Adafruit -- My take on the Brakelight backpack!

[altenmuenster]

I hope this is the right place to do it, if not, let me know.

I just wanted to say thanks to Adafruit, the community and surrounding Arduino enthusiasts for a really fun learning experience over the last few days. I have been working on modding the Flora Brakelight backpack concept for the past couple of days. This is my first real experience with Arduino at all. The Adafruit tutorials and documentation have been invaluable.

I am looking forward to getting some of my students involved with Arduino soon.

For me, having a goal and needing to rewrite a lot of the code to work for my implementation was vital.

I have yet to really dive into the accelerometer aspect of things. It isn't exactly doing what I expected right now.

Here's some pics of my prototyping . . .

http://imgur.com/a/ikG09/

And a video of what I have up and running so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVZeLlZfJuE

If you want a look at my code . . . constructive feedback is always welcome!

http://db.tt/Hx8sauDj

[adafruit_support_bill]

Looking good! Keep us posted on your progress.

[Bluebie]

That looks really cool! I'm working on a similar thing myself actually. I recently made glowing cosplay ears with florapixels, and since they've become a standard part of my outfit, so when I'm riding my motorbike I have them strapped down to my backpack with the ears sticking out from under a flap. I'm about to hook them up to a little arduino with a radio link to my bike so they light up as aditional brake lights and blinkers while I'm driving. I've been meaning to replace the indicators on my bike with LED versions anyway, so this is a great chance to get that sorted out too.

After playing around with plugs a bunch and trying to find cabling which is comfortable to wear, rugged, reliable, and plentiful, I've settled on 3.5mm audio jacks - the kind used for earbuds. You can grab m/m, m/f, f/f versions on ebay for less than a dollar each and the wires are sturdy with pretty decent plugs. They're so cheap you can just cut out the plugs with a stanley knife whenever you need a male or female plug. With three conductors you have everything you need to drive some florapixels, with a nice soft wire and a connector which will tear out without breaking anything if you're in an accident. You can even get 4 connector versions (used for phone headsets) but they're a bit more annoying to track down. I think you'll find audio cables a much better solution than ethernet cables. ^_^

Registered an account so I could subscribe to this thread. Excited to see where this project goes!