I have been thinking of doing a project in wearable electronics. Adding lights that blink on a skirt when I move seemed a good one to start. I had a white skirt lying in my cupboard. I got a Flora board, one Accelerometer/Compass Sensor and some LED Sequins from Adafruit. There are a few distributors of Adafruit in India. I got all of my stuffs required for this project from ProtoCentral. I also got conductible thread, a 3.7V Lithium Ion battery and a Adafruit Lipo charger to charge the battery from any USB port.
Before any stitching, I tested the board and the Accelerometer using jumper wires and a breadboard. I got an initial version of the code working too where the Accelerometer was sending the x, y and z values on the Serial Monitor in the Arduino IDE.
I stitched my circuit on the inner lining of the skirt. Here’s how the circuit looks.
Here’s the github link to the code that I uploaded on the board. I took the code mentioned on the Adafruit’s Sparkle Skirt manual, but I had to make some changes since I was using LED Sequins instead of Neo-Pixels. LED Sequins are much cheaper than the Neo-Pixels and I didn’t need the brightness and functionalities of Neo-Pixels. Also I adjusted the delay values and the move threshold values to make my circuit work.
And, after a long spell of procrastination and some more procrastination, I made the initial version. Need to add more sequins to this to make the lights more visible. Here’s how the initial version looks like.
Some learnings which are scattered in many videos and blogs on the adafruit website
1. You can not put more than 5 Sequins in parallel on a single Flora pin.
2. But if you use Neo-Pixels, you can put as many because they are chainable.
3. For 1 to 5 New-Pixels, use 2 Ply Stainless conductive thread. For more than 5 Neo-Pixels, use 3 Ply Stainless conductive thread. For more than 20, you should use silicone covered wire.