Is there any garment so freeing to wear as a skirt, assuming it isn’t skin tight? (Well, unless that’s your thing — we won’t judge.) Skirts and dresses are pretty darn freeing compared to pants, so it’s too bad that most of them come without pockets. And it’s really too bad that pretty much all skirts and dresses come without RGB LEDs that can react to movement. Maybe someday.
Until then, we’ll just have to design our own LED skirt like [makeTVee] and his girlfriend did, and hope that it looks half as good. This skirt has six RGB LED strips running down the front for a total of 120 LEDs. The strips are held in place with hook and loop tape and all the electronics — an Adafruit QT Py, a 6-DOF IMU, and a USB power bank — are tucked into the waistband and can be easily removed when it’s time to wash the skirt. Continuing with the practicality theme, there are no LEDs on the back, though they could easily be added in for getting down on the dance floor.
We really love the fabric choices here. The overlay fabric looks good on its own, but it also does a great job of showing and diffusing the light, while at the same time hiding the LED strips themselves. It’s clear that they took comfort and practicality into consideration and made a wearable that’s truly wearable. [makeTVee] calls this a work in progress, but has already got a few nice animations going, which you can see in the video after the break.
If you don’t care whether your wearables are practical, try this fiber optic jellyfish skirt on for size.
With a small audio pickup you could have it music active. Filter it for 800hz cutoff to pickup the low frequencies and have it change with the beat. You could even put an adjustable pot in the controller for squelch.
good idea ..
Arguably, having it motion-sensitive is music active — it’s just that it’s using its wearer (and their sense of rhythm) as a filter.
Unless you can’t dance….
My strong recommendation is using cnlohr’s ColorChord on an 8266, as it does the best music->colour conversion I’ve ever seen.
I looked that up along with a few others. There is no question these are the way to go, almost all the work has been done for you. I was going to originally suggest beyond just a low freq pickup that you could bucket through an AtoD on one of the newer chips. Seems to me the ESP32 has a line for that, could be wrong though. But you could control it through your phone like these other packages have, a great option, already done.
Like when I would program a really cool piece of code back on the Apple II in 79 and it would show up in the next Apple magazine, only a better version. Seems others had the same ideas, and I was always pulling up the rear. Pretty humbling. To be fair – a learning experience if you take it as such.
Did exactly that on a deadmau5 replica head a few years back.
https://youtu.be/i-8g4UUUR-k
+1. VERY cool! I bet that makes a slash on the Cosplay/Halloween scene – even a D.J. at a bar could use this I bet. I couldn’t see what the head was in the video you posted – but the construction video showed it in the finished product. Very creative.
“SPLASH”
:-|) Boing! Groovy intro.
The modes all look good, especially considering that they’re all linear, though I was surprised that there wasn’t a “bubble” mode.
How do you wash things like this? Do you disassemble whole skirt or is there some neat trick behind it?
Sewable (some?) circuits can be washed so long as the battery is removed. See Ada Fruit’s learning article on them. I’m going to guess machine vs handwash will have more to do with your sewing skill and the desired longevity than anything else.
The article says that “the electronics are tucked into the waistband and can be easily removed when it’s time to wash the skirt”. May be the LEDs, cabling, etc, can be attached with Velcro, so they can also be removed for washing (unless it makes them too bulky).
Nice project, well done !
Best regards,
A/P Daniel F. Larrosa
Montevideo – Uruguay
Nice idea! Another idea: swirl around, stop, and the lights keep running around the skirt :)
Would be great to have the build info and code to make with grand daughter.
all of that is in the link at the top of the article https://hackaday.io/project/177255-neopixel-led-skirt
Thanks I did look at that but did not go deep enough.
all that is in the link at the top of the article https://hackaday.io/project/177255-neopixel-led-skirt
If can get her spinning can display messages (POV) like: Home by 11, my uncle owns a gun, dont touch, and other shtuff a guardian would like to convey.
What did you use for overlay fabric? I love it!