[Geri] has an awesome brother. He made this amazing LED dress for her to wear at the [Taylor Swift] concert last weekend!
As you may or may not know, she encourages her fans to bring “glowy” things to wave around at her concerts. A quick check of the exhibition arena’s conditions of entry, and it seemed like LEDs would be allowed, so [Patrick] got to work.
He’s using a set of waterproof red LED strips and a cheap controller ordered from China. They needed a rather beefy battery pack so [Patrick] threw together a switchmode buck converter to drop a 19.8V 4.5A/h battery pack to a constant 12V for the LED controller. Not wanting to mess up the red cocktail dress, their mom sewed the strips into place. The dress is super bright and looks great — it draws about 25W, so the battery pack should last for the entire duration of the concert.
Unfortunately about a week before the concert they discovered Vector Arena is not allowing LED lights into the concert, which as you can imagine, was quite heartbreaking.
Thankfully, someone reached out to the organizers and they made an exception for them! [Geri] even ended up on the front page of their local newspaper! Stick around after the break to see a video of the dress in action!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MY9UhbTGUE
[Thanks Mike!]
Ohh wow, something form NZ on hackaday.
Yeah, impressed.
Not into dresses and all but it does look cool
Nice job, but the belt for the battery kind of ruins the look, he should have put the battery in a clutch purse. Also his sister is pretty cute!
I’m a bit surprised he opted for such a huge (almost 1kg) battery: if you take two cell phone batteries, they would have roughly the same capacity, yet be a lot smaller and light weight (maybe 120g at most, or only about 12% of the weight). Still a nice project of course!
Having a second look – the voltage is higher than I expected (19.8V), so you’d need more than two. Probably 6 or 8 of these would suffice, and still be lighter, i would think, but maybe the difference isn’t as big: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Golden-battery-BG58100-Brand-New-2450mAh-Battery-For-HTC-Sensation-Sensation-XE-G14-Z710E/1502381065.html
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[Patrick] threw together a switchmode buck converter to drop a 19.8V 4.5A/h battery pack to a constant 12V
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I think you missed the 12V needed to run the LED.
Kudos to the arena for making the exception. The dress turned out great, and Geri looks fantastic. Nice work!
I know what the response will be, but they should make an exception for everyone, or no-one.
Hooking up LEDs to a COTS LED controller is a hack? Whats the next article, those blinking Reeboks from the 90s?
its about as original as your bitching. try something new, like shutting up.
i feast on your tears crybaby
You should make it so that it has smarter light control – and can write words or shapes when she moves. It would likely be a cousin of something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvihYPq_mQ