Sing Me A Dress

Rapunzel
Jasmine
Ariel
Presenting at Closing Ceremonies
Testing the Lights

Inspiration

Who doesn't want to be a princess?

What it does

As you sing, we parse the lyrics of the song and match them to a Disney princess's song. The LEDs then take on the pattern of the dress of the princess you are singing.

How we built it

Magic and Fairy Dust!

Kidding. The LEDs are individually programmable Neopixels (by Adafruit), and what we've done to dressify them is map them into different regions on the body-- so we control bust, waist, and sections of the skirt. We can customize per princess following that, but we assign colors to each section once the princess has been identified.

To parse the song lyrics, we use an API called DeepGram.

Challenges we ran into

Customizing Elsa's dress, which doesn't follow standard princess dress configuration. We coded a gradient into the dress, by taking the initial RGB value and ending RGB value and having each R, G, and B increase proportionally. We discovered, however, that they can't linearly change or the colors in the middle of the dress will be on a completely different spectrum since the ratios are off.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We SANG in front of the entire closing ceremonies at MHacks: Refactor. Don't believe me? ("Ask the dishes!" Kidding.) Check it out here. If that isn't every singing averse engineer's nightmare, I don't know what is.

Also, we built a dress that parsed out lyrics and displayed a princess dress in real time. None of us had experience with LEDs or lyric parsing before this project.

What we learned

40A of power wrapped around your body gets a little toasty. We also learned a lot about each other, our love for Disney tunes, and code! We worked heavily with the Edison trying to integrate it with the Arduino IDE, and although it didn't end up working, guess what group of girls knows about back end Linux now? We also learned about waveforms, phonetic parsing, and how much of a headache you can get from staring at LEDs too long.

Built With

arduino
deepgram
intel-edison
ios
neopixels

Submitted to

MHacks: Refactor
- Winner MHacks Top 5

Created by

Chief Hardware Geek in the house! I built the LED dress and set it up with power. Fun fact-- each LED pulled up to 60 mA, and with 60 LEDs per meter thats 2-4A p/m, and there were 16m of LEDs in the dress! So I capped it at 40A and had multiple power supplies feeding into the dress. I also wrote the code that accepted the princess name from Harshita's Princess Prediction Process and displayed that dress.

Xyla Foxlin
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. -Douglas Adams
I wrote the code that uniquely animated each princess's dress. This involved mapping the placement of the lights on the dress and assigning each princess her own color scheme, animation, and special feature! Our favorites were the Elsa gradient, the Cinderella slow spin, and the Ariel sparkle functions. I also worked on integrating the hardware and software components of the project.

Gitanjali Kaw
Biomedical and Macromolecular Engineering Student
I worked on sound recognition and princess predication process. I used the DeepGram API, standard iOS technologies, and Bluetooth to tell the dress which princess to turn into!

Harshita Gupta
You had me at 'Hello, world!'
Abril Vela