Thanks to Rahil for sending in this adorable project!
Finding a birthday gift for the sweetest 3 year old girl around has been the most arduous task wife and I faced in a while. We figured it’s the perfect opportunity to foray into wearable electronics. The idea was to put LEDs on an accessory that she might find useful/playful. Adafruit Neopixels were the easy choice. They are easy to use, colorful, comes in variety of form factor and pretty much everything has been figured out about them. The difficult part was to find the perfect accessory. We spent several hours browsing Amazon and debating between quilted purse and backpack. I believed that the backpack is more functional while she found the purse to be more cute. We settled on purse for undocumented reasons. Next task was to look around for the perfect purse. It should have a separate backpocket for all the electronics and battery with wires going through a hole to the Neopixels and button in front. Amazon has something exactly what we needed, as always. Everything arrived in a week. I spent a Saturday afternoon soldering everything, forking the code for trinket. My wife spent few hours putting everything inside and securing them for child’s use.
Hardware Required:
- 1 x NeoPixel Ring – 12 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers
- 1 x Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 3.3V Logic
- 1 x Lithium Ion Polymer Battery – 3.7v 1200mAh [I found this to be have optimum mAh/$ spent]
- 1 x Adafruit Micro Lipo – USB LiIon/LiPoly charger (v1)
- 2 x NeoPixel Diffused 8mm Through-Hole LED – 5 Pack
- 1 x 12mm Push-to-ON button
- 1 x Stephen Joseph Girls 2-6X Quilted Purse, Butterfly
Tools:
- Leather hole punch tool
- Soldering iron
- Crimping tool
Featured Adafruit Products!
NeoPixel Ring – 12 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 12 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 1.5″ (37mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. Read more.
Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 3.3V Logic: Trinket may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATtiny85, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost arduino-IDE programmable board! Read more.
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!