Something I have always wanted to know more about was wearable technology, and once I had to finalize something for my midterm project, I decided to try making a mood dress where different colour LEDs would light up when the button was pressed on the website it was connected to. But since I faced a bunch of problems, I dumbed it down to a much simpler form with six LEDs in total.
This is what the model “dress” looked like without any of the wirings.
The bracket (not shown) was made of thin wire hangers cut and stuck to a brown foam base with a glue gun. They were brought to a sort-of humanoid shape with thread (both the glue and solder weren’t sticking) and the white lacey cloth was strung together in two parts: the top bust (stitched) and the bottom skirt (pleated and stitched) and were attached to the bracket with more thread and some glue.
Next, the wiring was done. I tried setting up multiple colour LEDs, but it wouldn’t work with more than one LED in series for the yellow or green colour, so I stuck with the red. According to the current reading, only two of the red LEDs could be added to a single output pin. This is what the wirings looked from inside and the LEDs look like attached from inside to the dress.
One thing I had really wanted to do was add the LEDs in a particular pattern so that they look neater when lighting up, but because of the mess inside the dress with the wires, I couldn’t insert the LEDs to the pattern I wanted it to be in.
For the code, I used the Ethernet shield over the Serial Peripheral Interface rather than the aREST library because I thought it was easier. This is a section of the code.
After being set up, these were the three settings of the led that lit up. Since there was only one colour LED that I could use, I thought of using sections rather than colour.
After this project was over, I realized there were many aspects to it I would like to improve later on if I had more time, like the overall look of the model, the number of LEDs, and even work on different patterns with the different lights and maybe incorporate other colour LEDs by removing them from series to match up the current.