When your climbing gym throws a “glow in the dark” party, how can you stand out? For [Martijn], the answer was obvious. He made a jacket adorned with 32 WS2812 addressable LEDs whose color is addressable depending on the altitude to which he has climbed.
The build is centered on an Arduino Pro Mini with a barometric sensor and an NRF24L01 for radio communications. A pair of pockets contain AA batteries for power, and he’s all set to climb. A base station Arduino with the same set-up transmits an up-to-the-minute reading for ground level temperature, which is compared to the local reading from the barometric sensor and used to calculate a new color for the LEDs. A Kalman filter deals with noise on the pressure reading to assure a stable result. Arduino sketches for both ends are provided on the project’s Hackaday.io page.
The LEDs are mounted on the jacket’s stretch fabric with an excess of wire behind the scenes to cater for the stretch. You can see the resulting garment in the short YouTube video below the break.
We saw this jacket at the UK’s Electromagnetic Field festival (Thanks [Jasmine] for the tip!), LED jackets are a festival favorite. We’ve had quite a few LED jackets over the years, here’s a round-up we did in 2013.
Image 4 in the project gallery shows some interesting wiring work.
I’m not a climber, but that’s a cool idea and great implementation!
“…transmits an up-to-the-minute reading for ground level temperature, which is compared…”
Methinks that should be “pressure” (easy to get from the context, I know, but for completeness’ sake…)
Just be sure that that climbing is not in an airplane you have to get in through an TSA controlled airport, Or may suffer the same fate as Star Simpson with machine guns pointing at your head… if you are lucky.
well this professional tier work, certainly from the outside. very different to a breadboard taped to the front of a tshirt with all wires hanging out of it and parading it around an airport. hopefully its not in a school and the jacket isn’t made out of a smashed up clock and dorky pencil case either, otherwise someone might have to take a proportionate and measured response here too.
When the jacket descends from a great height to ground level in a very short time, does the jacket change to a matching red? (sorry I could not resist asking this).
But seriously now, I think this is a very nice project.
Next, take long exposure photo of you clmbing.