You Light Up My Life

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  A touch of elegance in subzero temperatures.

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  Changing colors with distance.

Inspiration

Hackers Ray and Kate are engaged! Kate will wear a dress like this at their wedding this summer. The concept of wearable technology that responds to the wearer's movement comes from Ray's experience in Cleveland Institute of Art's 'In the Dark' fashion competition. His team took first place after presenting two beautiful dresses which responded to different inputs (steps and acceleration).

What it does

This dress (and matching bow tie) twinkle randomly in a blue color at their resting state. When the two pieces get closer together, the color gradually shifts to a romantic red.

How it's done

Neopixels are controlled by RFduino microcontrollers in each piece. The strength of the Bluetooth signal they receive from each other is used to approximate distance. The wedding dress was not built from scratch- it's a dress from Goodwill that matches the general structure of Kate's wedding dress.

Challenges

Originally, the plan was for the pieces glow white, and to change in brightness as they got closer together. But the neopixels make white light by shining bright red, green, and blue at once. The power draw of so many pixels shining at once proved to be too much for the hardware, and voltage issues caused the RFduinos to frequently reset. Moving to a color-responsive system reduced the power requirement by a factor of three, and also makes a much more noticeable change than variable brightness did.

Accomplishments

This is the first Hackathon Kate and Ray have ever been to. Completing a project of this size in just 36 hours was a huge accomplishment.

Learning

Kate had almost no Arduino experience coming into hackCWRU, and learned all the basics of Arduino programming very quickly! Ray already knew a lot about Arduinos, but picked up a lot of new skills in the field of sewing/tailoring.

What's next for You Light Up My Life

Ray and Kate plan to repeat this process with her real wedding dress (and careful oversight from a real tailor)! Beyond that, the illuminated wedding dress will likely make an appearance on Kickstarter in the coming months!

Built With

• adafruit
• fastled
• neopixels
• rfduino