bling

2 Articles

Is That A Tweet On Your Belt Buckle Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

May 8, 2018 by 8 Comments

What a time to be alive! The range of things you never knew you needed but absolutely must have expands at a breakneck pace, such that it’s now possible to pick up a belt buckle with an embedded LED matrix to scroll messages. We have no idea what the use case for something like this is, but some people will buy anything.

One such person was a friend of [Brian Moreau], who doubled down after being gifted the glowing bauble by turning it into a WiFi enabled Tweet-scrolling belt buckle. It appears to be a just for fun project, and to be honest one would need a heck of a belt for the buckle after his mods. He added an ESP8266 to take care of monitoring his Twitter account and driving the display on the belt buckle, a non-trivial task given that the thing is programmed with only two buttons that scroll through characters to compose a message. The microcontroller might have fit inside the original buckle or only added a little to its bulk, but [Brian] decided to replace the two coin cells powering it with an external 6-volt battery pack. That required a buck converter to power the ESP, so the whole thing ended up being thrown in a case and acting more like a neat display than a flashy fashion statement.

We’d bet some tradeoffs could be made to reduce the bulk and get that buckle back where it belongs, though. Once it does, maybe it’ll be part of a complete LED-laden ensemble, from head to toe.

LED necklace

IBling Is An LED Display Necklace

January 8, 2015 by 12 Comments

Are you tired of being ignored? Do you want a fashion accessory that says, “Pay attention to me!” If so, you should check out [Al’s] recent instructable. He’s built himself a necklace that includes a display made up of 512 individual LEDs.

This project was built from mostly off-the-shelf components, making it an easy beginner project. The LED display is actually a product that you can purchase for just $25. It includes 512 LEDs aligned in a 16 x 32 grid. The module is easily controlled with a Pixel maker’s kit. This board comes with built-in functionality to control one of these LED modules and can accept input from a variety of sources including Android or PC. The unit is powered from a 2000 mAH LiPo battery.

[Al] had to re-flash the firmware of the Pixel to set it to a low power mode. This mode allows him to get about seven hours of battery life with the 2000 mAH battery. Once the hardware was tested and confirmed to work correctly, [Al] had to pretty things up a bit. Some metallic gold spray paint and rhinestones transformed the project’s cyberpunk look into something you might see in a hip hop video, or at least maybe a Weird Al hip hop video.

The Pixel comes with several Android apps to control the display via Bluetooth. [Al] can choose one of several modes. The first mode allows for pushing animated gif’s to the display. Another will allow the user to specify text to scroll on the display. The user can even specify the text using voice recognition. The final mode allows the user to specify a twitter search string. The phone will push any new tweets matching the terms to the display as scrolling text.