#electronichalloween

I love building stuff and tinkering with electronics.  Years ago I was a High School Cisco Networking teacher that sponsored a FIRST robotics team for a few years.  They were very long nights but I love working with the students and building the different things that we designed.  Since I'm not a teacher anymore I have not built many electronic projects.

I had heard of the Raspberry Pi and recently purchased one to play with this summer.  It was fun to play with the linux distro but nothing really sparked my imagination until I heard about the Arduino and more specifically Adafruit.  I think my introduction was watching the AOL hardwired youtube video with iJustine.  I loved the idea of making my own Wearable project.  So I started to think about the different things I could build.  Nothing was jumping out at me but then my Daughter (Emma) was watching a Wearable Wednesday video with me and she showed me her sketch book of Dress Designs.

Emma showed me one of her favorite sketches of a dress that had a campfire theme.   

The waist would have a design that showed a marshmallow roasting over the flames.  As we talked about how to make the fire light up I came up with the idea of altering the design to make this a Hunger Games inspired dress.  She could then wear this for her Halloween Costume and the Movie premiere.  The only catch was I can work with the electronics but neither Emma ,who is 8, or I could actually make the Dress.

Luckily for us my Mother in Law (Linda) is an amazing dressmaker.  So we made sure she had time to help us since she lives a few hours away and we were in business. 

My first order of business was buying the parts I needed for the electronic portion.  I took my cues from the tutorial on Adafruit called the Sparkle Skirt Tutorial.  I got the Flora, LMS Accelerometer and 4 Neopixel LEDs.  Shipping was quick and I was playing with the Flora and LEDs in no time.  My original idea was to sew individual LEDs in the shape of the fire but to save cost I decided to buy 1M of the 60 neopixel strip.

While I was waiting for the Neopixel strip to come in the mail Linda came to my house to fit the Dress to Emma.  She had picked out a black stretchy fabric show it would not wrinkle.  She also found some very nice sheer Red and Gold fabric we will use for the Fire at the bottom of the dress.  Emma drew the Fire design with chalk on the fabric and Linda left me the fabric so I could attach the FLORA and Neopixels.

Once the Neopixels came in I read the Neopixel Uberguide and when I setup my test circuit I quickly understood how important having a common ground is important.  

I went through several test of wiring and finally settled on using stranded 22 gauge hookup wire. I used what I think is a whip stitch to secure the wire and LED strip to the fabric.  Emma was very helpful at this point because I have only sewn on a button.  She helped me get the thread started and tied the thread off.  Emma also had helped me solder the hookup wire to the LED strips.

Now that the hardware was ready it was time to start programming.  Since this is my first Wearable project and I'm not a programmer I was a bit nervous.  I scoured the forums at Adafruit because I wanted each strip to light at the same time but not to flash.  I found the following code that I made into a function.

void fire(uint32_t c, uint8_t wait) { for(uint16_t i=0; i<19; i++) { strip.setPixelColor(i, c); //Sets the starting LED of the strips strip.setPixelColor(i+4, c); strip.setPixelColor(i+13, c); strip.setPixelColor(i+32, c); strip.setPixelColor(i+39, c); strip.setPixelColor(i+49, c); strip.setPixelColor(i+54, c);

strip.show(); delay(wait); } }

I don't completely understand the code but the best I figure is that I had to set the starting LED of each strip.  The largest strip has 19 LEDs so that is why I used i<19.  I am sure there are much better ways but this is working for me right now. 

I also attached the LMS accelerometer to the Flora so I could change the light animation based on when Emma would be walking.  I started off with a smaller fire animation and when she walked the Fire would blaze with all the LEDs.  Once the dress was done we discovered the Flashrandom found in the Sparkle Skirt tutorial looked great when she was standing still.