Smother Yourself In Addressable LEDs

Guess where this guy’s headed in his suit of many colors? If you said Burning Man give your self a pat on the back. After making a half-hearted EL suit for the festival in 2010 [Sander] decided he needed to step it up this year. He bought and affixed 200 LED modules to this suit so that he could light up the night.

They’re mounted in a grid, and in order to keep the changing patterns orderly he mapped the physical location of each in his code using a two-dimensional array. The controller uses an Arduino nano to push the patterns out to the array via SPI.

[Sander] included several different visual effects for the controller. One strobes the suit starting from the right cuff when he shakes someone’s hand. There’s also an audio spectrum analyzer chip and microphone that let him pulse the lights to music. You can see how bright this thing is in the image above, but to get the full effect shouldn’t skip the video after the break.

He’s entered the project into the Full Spectrum Laser Cutter giveaway. If he wins, we expect laser cut goodness for next year’s festival!

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29552399 w=470]

[via Build Lounge]

10 thoughts on “Smother Yourself In Addressable LEDs

  1. I am a software engineer that is just getting into hardware stuff… I bought my first arduino a few weeks ago… I am wondering if anyone has any links/insight into how he managed to individually control all of these LEDs with the few output pins of the arduino. I have read a bit about digital pots and some other integrated circuits… so I’m assuming there’s some working going on with those or something similar… Any insight would be a benefit to my ever growing understanding of hardware design…

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