100 pixels on an internet enabled skirt

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arevalomalina
 
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100 pixels on an internet enabled skirt

Post by arevalomalina »

Hi! I'm trying to make a skirt that will light up with 100 led pixels whenever someone tweets at me. I've got an electric imp prototype that lights up one LED when someone @mentions my twitter handle. Can you guide me on how I might power and connect 100 pixel LED's? Can I accomplish this with conductive wiring? If not, what do I need? What considerations do I need to make when purchasing the battery pack? Also, am I going to set myself on fire? lol Thanks for any help!

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adafruit_support_rick
 
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Re: 100 pixels on an internet enabled skirt

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

Your best bet is to use NeoPixels. This requires an Arduino microcontroller to be attached to your electric imp. You can connect the Neopixels with conductive thread, and control them from the Arduino.

We have several wearable projects using NeoPixels on the Learning System:
https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=neopixel
The search comes up with over 5 pages of Neopixel projects, so be sure to click through them all!

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michaelmeissner
 
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Re: 100 pixels on an internet enabled skirt

Post by michaelmeissner »

Before you go for all 100, be sure to try it with a more moderate amount of lights, 100 lights on a single dress might be a little bit of overkill. Also pay attention to the power level of the lights. Neopixels can be very bright if they are used full power and people are near by. Bear in mind, the more lights you have and the stronger power they put out, you will have to carry increasingly larger/heavier batteries to power all of these.

And at the 100 level, you will not be able to use the smaller microprocessors (Trinket, Gemma) since they don't have enough memory to drive that many lights.

Always sit down, and figure out exactly what effects you want ahead of time, and break the project into smaller pieces that you can test independently of each other (or at least in a progression from simpler to more complex effects).

If you don't want to go with neopixels or learning Arduino, since the electric imp supports i2c, perhaps it might be simpler to use 8 mcp23017's, that each can support up to 16 LEDs.

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