The Fab(ulous) Lab Journey of Sophie K.

Applications and Implications

My final project is "Dance of the LEDs. It will be a Shirt with LEDs that I shall dance in. It is something intended for my personal use, with potential to grow into a marketable product sold to dancers of all sort of genres. I don't mind other's taking the project and expanding on it but would love to hear about developments as that's the best way to grow after all.

The project requirements are as following:

• Must be visually pleasing to look at. Craftmanship refined. LEDs and the mechanical works should not be distracting from the actual product/project.
• Should be able to move in shirt. It should not be too restricting otherwise I will not be able to dance in it
• LEDs should react to movement with use of Gyroscope and accelerometer, and should in turn change color.
• Color spectrum should not be small/limited to just red green and blue but include colors such as pink or turquoise.

LEDs should be visible from every angle and not a singular angle. This way no matter where my arms are or move, there are always a bunch visible.

For this project I will require:

• RGB LED strips 2x
• Ardunio/Mini Sophie Bueno Board 2x
• Wires (preferably ones to match their objective, but also won't show up through the shirt)
• Power source
• Mini usb cables 2x
• 3D printed case
• Battery holder (which will be laser cut)
• Battery cell 3V 4x (2x for each arm)
• Copper tape (to use when making battery holder)
• String and thin needle(for sewing, white was used but depending on your shirt choose accordingly)
• 2mm acrylic (to use for laser cutting battery holder)
• Red and black wires to use for batteries
• Fillament (for 3D printing, color is up to you, choose dependent on your shirt's material)
• Volatge regulator - 5V

For this board I will require:

• Atmeg32U4 2x
• LED 2x (color is irrelevant, it is for you to see if your board is working when you are programming it)
• Gyroscope IMU 2x
• 16 MHZ Crystal 2x
• USB mini-b 2x
• 10 uF capacitor 2x
• 1 uF capacitor 4x
• 0.1 uF capacitor 2x
• 18 pF capacitor 4x
• 22 Ohm resitor 4x
• 499 Ohm resitor 2x
• 680 Ohm resitor 2x
• N-type mosfet 6x (3x for each arm/led strip)
• Double sided copper 2x

Most in the list are double to account for the second board.

I have seen some stuff before, but really very few and they aren't always colorful. Most that are are designed by companies to be worn and aren't DIY friendly. Here are some things I found:

This is an Old Spice commerical that features Terry Crews creating music by flexing his muscles.

The aim of course is to make everything myself. If I were a pro I would have also made the shirt myself. I will be designing the board myself and the setup of the LEDs too as well as their placement and the gyroscopes too. I will also take time to decide on their placement on the shirt and how the shirt was to look like. Basically designing the looks. I will do the code and used past codes as well as hack other ones I find online.

As for purchases, I think a maximum 20£ should be the price. This is because of the LED strips which I shall order off of amazon, and then the shirt. The shirt was the cheaper one, it is more the LEDs. The rest where things we had in the lab already. I didn't want to make this project too expensive because I didn't think it was necessary, but also, being very broke as a student, I only had so much I could invest.

This project will involve a few weeks:

• Electronics Production - Milling my various boards and finidng the best methods to do so.
• Embedded Programming Week - Programming my board to work with the gryoscope and LEDs without having to always load Arduino
• Textiles (wildcardweek) Week - Wearable Electronics
• Electronics Production Week - Creating various designs for my board
• Input and Outputs Week - Taking the movements taken by the gyroscope, recording them in Arduino, and then translating that data into RGB data to then output on the LEDs. This way the LEDs are responsive to my movements.
• 3D Design and Printing Week - casing for board
• Computer-controlled Cutting Week - laser cutting a battery holder

I will be constantly reflecting during this creation process as I need to be agile. If I try to stay too much on course I will frustrate myself if something doesn't go to plan. So I need to be willing to change things around to still fit my goal as well as not consume a lot of time. On top of that, I need to figure out the best method to get the LEDs attached to one another and to sew them onto the shirt without damaging them or the shirt AND still looking presentable.