Heath’s Sparkly LED Messenger Bag #WearableWednesday
There’s lots to like about this hacked Chrome messenger bag by maker “Heath Heathen”. Let’s start off with the combo of Adafruit parts including a GEMMA microcontroller (although he first does tests with a FLORA), NeoPixels and a LiPoly battery. He also made things removable by soldering snaps onto the microcontroller and stitching to more snaps on a velcro strip holding the individual NeoPixels. Although these parts are washable, it could be that Heath was being thrifty and enabling his microcontroller to be used in other projects as well. Go modular! The resulting rainbow pattern is quite visible at night along with adding cute sparkle. However, the real bonus is the collection of geek badges on this bag including Beagle Bone, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Brewing, Processing and Welding. Something tells me this is only part of the collection because Heath’s other videos show quite the combo of skills. Anyway, the point is, everyone should have a cool bag like this. It’s a great way to meet other people and find out common interests, while the electronics keep you safe at night on the way home. Heath, thanks for making my day and you can bet I’m going to start my own badge collection starting with the thing that got me involved with electronics from the start—Arduino. The rest of you peeps, be sure to search “badges” in our store to discover all the fun topics you can proudly display.
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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