Last week for Halloween, I dressed up as a flasher.
This is sadly the only video I have of it in action since Victoria and I got separated from the group early on in the parade, but here are some additional pictures of the interior and exterior
The exterior shell is a coat that I had designed, patterned, and made some time ago.
I cut 6 segments of LED strips compatible with the neopixel library into 4 LED sections for a total of 24 LEDs, all connected in parallel. The LED portion of the circuit was attached to the innermost layer of lining so that no stitching would be visible from the inside of the coat. The second layer of lining was added to create light diffusion and to also hide the circuit.
Through a small opening in the seam joining the right lining and facing, I pulled the rest of the circuit with the Gemma, lithium battery, and button through. The Gemma and battery were inserted in a pouch I sewed into the lining, and the button was attached to the right front button hole for quick access.
Building the circuit was straightforward because I was able to preview it on TinkerCAD first. The coding, however, was the trickiest part. I had originally planned to use code from a library of LED strip effects that I had found on the web, but it was incompatible with the ButtonCycler example that I wanted to build on. For this reason, I opted to use the sequences in the ButtonCycler, tweaking some of the delays and cycle times.