Who doesn’t love LEDs on their wrist — especially when they can interact. This bracelet was one of the popular workshops at Wear It Berlin. So, expect to see some illuminated hands moving with the techno music at Berlin’s clubs. It really does work well for dancing since the LEDs react to audio levels with their brightness and to movement with their color. Wouldn’t it be great to see a whole bunch of people doing a line dance with this? Someone please send a photo! Speaking of photos, big thanks to Richard Gretzinger, Adlan Mansri and Michael Wittig for sparing me from using the photos on my phone.
The workshop was led by Morris Winkler, one of the founders of Open 3D Engineering. Morris is a software engineer with a love of 3D printing. In fact, he and his crew have just invented a new printer which was used to create the bracelets for the workshop.
The circuit for the band is alive with Adafruit parts, including a Trinket, a FLORA Accelerometer/Compass Sensor, an AGC Electret Microphone Sensor, and some 60 LED NeoPixel Strip. The Trinket is tiny, and Morris did face a hurdle.
I realized that the available flash memory is quiet small, so adding functionality needs some skills in code squeezing.
Luckily, Morris happens to have such skills; he’s also not bad with spatial relations.
Although the workshop went well, it did take a day for people to get their bands assembled. Morris wishes there had been time for people to take the next step.
The interesting part is rather to think of a interactive design and how to relic that in an arduino sketch, but we never made it that far.
I remember my first Arduino class years ago, trying to make sense of breadboards, different electronic parts and the idea of something that was programmable. It was fun, but it was also a lot to take in. So, I believe a first attempt doing a bracelet involving soldering, sensors and programming to be quite amazing. A little happiness goes a long way.
Morris has posted the supplies and code needed for his project here on Github. However, if you don’t have the capability to 3D print, you can still create your own simple LED band. Just follow the directions for our NeoPixel Punk Collar, but do it on a leather or vinyl band instead. Punk anything is so Berlin.
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!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!