Hector wrote in to share his MIDI necktie with FLORA NeoPixels, controlled by Pinoccio, Abelton, and Max/MSP.
Internet connected wearable devices are getting more and more common these days. There are many devices available off-the-shelf right now, but there is something special about being able to imagine and create your own. To accomplish this, I truly think the best platform right now is to use a Pinoccio.
Pinoccio is a tiny little Arduino compatible board with Internet and connectivity built right into its DNA. I recently picked a kit up and I’ve been impressed by its ease of use. If you have Arduino experience, you can most definitely program a Pinoccio. It even has a scripting language (bitlash) baked right in, so only if you really need to, you need to go to the Arduino IDE. Moreover, the guys at Pinoccio provide a pretty intuitive web-interface and a Rest API to access your boards remotely from anywhere with Internet access.
The next ingredient on this specific recipe is a handful of Adafruit’s awesome Flora NeoPixels. NeoPixels are chainable, individually addressable RGB LED’s with a built-in current driver. Conveniently, the NeoPixel chain only uses 1 digital pin on the Pinoccio, leaving a lot of free room for interacting with other sensors or devices on your project.
To drive the NeoPixel chain with the Pinoccio, I wrote a library that extends the Pinoccio scripting language environment with functions to interact with the pixels right from the web or the API. I’ve made the library available.
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!