Monty’s NeoPixel Circuit & Halloween Costume Proposal

Neopixel Circuit

Here’s my super boomer-y video including both landscape and portrait oriented video, showing my set up, soldering and working circuit! Wooo! Thanks to Sofia G for helping me with the code 🙂

Tinkercad circuit link: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/kNSQNRE3DWs

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Halloween Brainstorm

To start off my Halloween brainstorming, I went back through some cool costumey things I had saved on Pinterest.

Here are some images that kicked off ideas of their own:

I started grouping Halloween-LED ideas together in a new board:

In the past I have done a fair bit of bead work and I’ve always been interested in creating a beaded veil as a head or face piece. I think it could be nice to incorporate LEDs into this somehow. Here are a few sketches and ideas:

1. The Ghost
I drew a glittery take on a ghost, made from a sheer material like mesh or organza, with crystal beads and LED lights attached like beads of condensation all around the form:

Materials needed:

• organza fabric (not sure about amount…)
• beading thread (1 spool, 50yds)
• white crystals in a few sizes (100 pcs)
• neopixel chips and maybe strips (maybe 40 pcs?)
• either an all black or all white bodysuit / sweat suit for underneath…

2. Space Princess

I also like the possibility of doing something smaller, like an LED hair veil, that could be paired with some additional LED accents on a black outfit that give off a spacey vibe. I’m also interested in creating a knotted bag from glow-in-the-dark-fluoro climbing rope, maybe with LEDs acting like a jewel-embellishment. Paired with some fluorescent face paint makeup, I think this could be a fun and accomplishable project:

Materials needed:

• glow in the dark climbing rope
• organza or fishnet
• headband
• rgb neopixel LED strips
• individual neopixel chips?
• black outfit
• glow in the dark facepaint

3. Obligatory Hoe-y Devil

The title says it all, and while this isn’t really my style, I thought wings could be fun to make using some sort of stretchy fabric around a wire structure. More realistically, I could interpret this into something more face-forward and create an LED-embellished head piece with wings or horns attached to it, like the headpiece references below the sketch, and then wear all black or all red .

Materials Needed:

• acrylic or plastic sheets (I could actually do the top left one from something like recycled pop-bottles)
• rgb neopixels
• sculptural wire and wire tools

or

• feathers
• rgb neopixels (to light up from within the base of the feathers and give an overall glow)
• sculptural wire and wire tools
• elastic material

4. Skeleton

This one is very halloweeny but to be honest I haven’t the foggiest idea how I would pull this off and make it actually look good. I feel like unless the bones were pretty close to “right”, they might look like a disaster. A light up stick figure might actually be more realistic for me (hehe).

Materials Needed:

• neopixel LED strips
• body suit or sweat suit
• fluroescent face paint.
• a better understanding of human anatomy.

5. Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady

Ok last thought — I could dress up as Eliza Doolittle, in her flower-seller form, and instead of lighting up a full costume, I could fill a basket of LED flowers! I could even keep the flowers and display them at home after-the-fact 🙂

Materials Needed:

• 3D printed flower forms OR
• I could make flowers out of milk jug plastic
• RGB neopixel LED lights for the blossoms, and strip LEDs for the stems
• a basket
• a full skirt and a hat

Which one do you think I should do??

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