Hotel Babylon fans will recognize Donna Air, who recently made news with her LED dress at the BAFTA Television Awards at London’s Covent Garden. You can check out more photos on DailyMail.com. The LEDs appear to be NeoPixel strips that have been draped in convenient areas across the chest and waist where they don’t incur sharp bends. The gown was custom designed in association with House of Fraser and Rebecca Street. More research pulled up an interesting video showing how the dress came to be. Check out the cool programming going on!
Like most splashy fashions, the dress received both positive and negative comments. The color of the NeoPixels becomes a bit washed out in the nude color of the fabric, but I think it is a welcome change from more obvious LED work I’ve seen. I also like the trailing strips that lead down the front of the gown accentuating the movement of the skirt. The neat part about this dress is that it is a good example of how you can get a lot of illumination with minimal sewing by using strips. If you want to hack your own formal dress, check out our Sparkle Skirt which uses a FLORA, NeoPixels and an accelerometer. Your movement causes the NeoPixels to light up. You can substitute NeoPixel strips and stitch casings for them in the underskirt of your dress. If you use the strips out of their weatherproof casing, they are quite lightweight, too. Have fun creating a flurry of LED magic on your dress, and don’t forget to send us some awesome pics.
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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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!