I decided I wanted to make something a little more elegant for Halloween this year (and for future parties / Burning Man). It’s a little hard to capture on video, but it’s really quite mesmerizing:

This is a tuxedo jacket that I bought at a thrift shop on Valencia St. ($17 for a Dior jacket that fit perfectly!) I ran WS2811 strips along the seams so as to take advantage of the natural lines of the jacket. They are wired together on the inside. The first strip terminates right at the bottom of the jacket and has three wires running up the inside to the front pocket.

In the pocket is the battery pack (4 Lithium AAs) and an Arduino Pro Micro. The Arduino controls the lights with the Adafruit Neopixel library. I put a toggle switch between the batteries and the Arduino so I could plug it into a USB port for programming while still running the light strips off the batteries.

This is the first program I wrote for it, and I’m pretty happy. I’m really excited that I can easily program dozens of patterns and also add sensors to it (motion, sound, light/color, etc.) Expect to see more videos of the jacket in the future.