LED Sparkle Skirt

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aymiee
 
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Joined: Tue May 14, 2013 8:04 am

LED Sparkle Skirt

Post by aymiee »

My daughter and I sewed RGB LED lights onto her dress for a school dance and it was a hit. There were a few questions I had because she wanted to try this again.

1) After tying the knots, we applied small duct tape over the knots. Is this appropriate? We were worried the ends might touch each other while she was dancing or sitting plus it was kind of rough and could scratch her.

2)Should we also duct tape the whole power line (front and back) in case there was a short? Or were the ends enough?

2) The duct tape was kind of tacky; Is there another way? Could we have applied heat to fabric tape over the conductive thread?

3) We programmed the lights to only show white lights,but noticed that other colors were displayed also. In the example below, we tried leaving just the white and/or also making all three white, but to no avail. Other colors were still displayed.

Code: Select all

uint8_t myFavoriteColors[][3] = {{200,   0, 200},   // purple                                 
                                                  {200,   0,   0},   // red              
                                               {200, 200, 200},   // white                               
};
4) At first, the front side of the dress displayed white lights and the back displayed red, blue and green lights. After a couple hours, the whole skirt would light up in red, blue and green lights colors. When we switched out the battery, it would display white lights again in the front and red, blue and green lights in the back. Not sure if this is due to our editing of the code or how we sewed on the electronics.

Thanks in advance!

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 10:11 am

Re: LED Sparkle Skirt

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

I'll refer questions 1-3 to the wearable experts. Questions 4 and 5 sound like they are possibly caused by a voltage drop due to the resistance of the conductive thread. Pixels further away (electrically) from the power source may operate erratically due to the lower voltage. Check to make sure all your connections are secure. You can double up or use heavier thread to reduce resistance. You can also run a copper wire "power bus" (stranded wire will be more flexible) to extend power to the more remote pixels.

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bekathwia
 
Posts: 215
Joined: Sat Dec 25, 2010 1:18 am

Re: LED Sparkle Skirt

Post by bekathwia »

1) Duct tape is not a perfect solution for this. We used clear nail polish to seal the knots and prevent them from coming untied and shorting out, then wore a slip under the skirt to avoid the scratchiness. Or just make the knots on the outside of the skirt lining so the itchy isn't facing skin.

2) If you're thinking of insulating the entire power bus, you should just use wire-- it's insulated already. =] But no, you don't need to apply tape or fabric to cover the conductive thread, just sew the lines about a 1/4" apart. Unless your skirt underlayer has lots of folds, shorting against one another shouldn't be a huge issue. If you suspect there is a short, use a multimeter-- duct tape will just secure the short in place.

2-2) You could use iron-on seam binding if you are really into the idea of insulating your thread.

3) Bill explained why some of your lights are red-- voltage drop, and you saw it extra as your battery died. The pixels are made of three individual LEDs in one package, and red has the lowest resistance, so when power is low, red is the only one that lights up. As for blue and green, that's got to be a signal problem-- check your signal lines are all very tightly sewn and not shorting to power or ground. To get more power to the back of the skirt, pay attention to the extra reinforced power and ground at the two sides of the skirt's circuit diagram-- it shows you how to make more direct connections to FLORA for better less voltage drop. Sounds from your description like you might have overlooked these.

4) Doesn't sound like anything's wrong with your code. One thing that will help you debug your pixels, however, is to run the strandtest code from the NeoPixel library, powered via USB. You can then see which LEDs are having trouble getting signal (they won't change color like the rest), and which ones are having trouble getting power (these will light up red or pink when you tell them to be white).

Best of luck, would love to see the results!

aymiee
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 14, 2013 8:04 am

Re: LED Sparkle Skirt

Post by aymiee »

Thank you both for the fast response. I see my mistakes now! Will fix and post the results!

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