Meet Vanilla Nieves, Chihuahua and professional model. She recently garnered attention at the New York Pet Fashion Show with her LED studded skirt and collar. Her couture was designed by two Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) pet fashion designers — Ada Nieves and Gladys Delgado-Garced. Here’s what Gladys had to say about the design.
I attend a dog fundraiser each February, and based on the theme, I come up with a design. This year it was luminaries, and when my friend sent me the skirt I thought, why not do rain patterns?
Gladys loves LEDs and immediately set to work on constructing the circuit. She started with a small matrix and gradually increased the size, testing as she went along. The final skirt had a total of 96 surface mount LEDs — 81 on the skirt matrix and 15 on the collar matrix.
I like the electronics, the fact that the animations can be changed hundreds of times. I like the way the matrix turned out, and with the two microcontrollers you can do patterns like diamonds, rain and X’s. People were in awe and very impressed. They really liked the lights and even MTV was there. I like that pets can enjoy fashion, too!
Obviously these two ladies enjoy their petite clients, so expect to see more glam designs. Want to turn your dog into Lady ChiHuaHua? Get a FLORA or GEMMA microcontroller and some NeoPixels for your creation.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!