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Hackaday Links: February 18, 2024

So it turns out that walking around with $4,000 worth of hardware on your head isn’t quite the peak technology experience that some people thought it would be. We’re talking about the recently released Apple Vision Pro headset, which early adopters are lining up in droves to return. Complaints run the gamut from totally foreseeable episodes of motion sickness to neck pain from supporting the heavy headset. Any eyeglass wearer can certainly attest to even lightweight frames and lenses becoming a burden by the end of the day. We can’t imagine what it would be like to wear a headset like that all day. Ergonomic woes aside, some people are feeling buyer’s remorse thanks to a lack of apps that do anything to justify the hefty price tag. The evidence for a wave of returns is mostly gleaned from social media posts, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. We wouldn’t expect Apple to be too forthcoming with official return figures, though, so the ultimate proof of uptake will probably be how often you spot one in the wild. Apart from a few cities and only for the next few weeks, we suspect sightings will be few and far between.

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LED Concert Dress

[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!

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