I have newly picked up the hobby of Shuffling as a way to listen to my favorite music and stay in shape. One of the cool things about shuffling is that there are a lot of cool items on the market geared towards shufflers. This page shows the exploration of the idea of creating wearables in order to marry technology with self expression. This is the first prototpe.
I began by assembling my materials: side emitting fiber optic cables to create lines for the pants, arduino flora to control the strip, neopixel strip, soldering iron, hot glue, and solder.
Part of this project was learning how to solder components correctly, in addition to making wearables. I intended to wire the fiberoptics through holes in the waist, to enable a more solid connection between the LEDs and the cross-section of the LED (the flatter a connection to the LED, the stronger the light that propagates throughout the optic cable.
Getting the LEDs to work as well as a close up of the lights.
Lessons Learned:
For my next protoype, I plan to experiment with conductive thread and combining little leds throughout the pant instead of using fiberoptic cables. While the fiber optic cables are flexible and are water proof, they can be difficult to keep in place, and I sometimes damage the cable to LED connection while putting on my pants. Now that I have experience using the Adafruit Neopixel library, I plan to play with the code to create desired effects. This combined with the conductive thread should make the pants more flexible.