[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!
