The Tech Dress to Wear When You Need to Be Late #WearableWednesday

How often are you late for gatherings? Well, no need to apologize for the late bus with this hacked dress appropriately named Millennial Word Clock. This is another fine project by Caitlin’sDad who is well known for his Adafruit love, and you’ll find his detailed directions on Instructables. Most people would complicate this dress with a RGB Matrix for the words, but simplicity is kept with a DIY stencil cut from vinyl heat transfer material with a Silhouette machine. The dress has some embroidery that gives it a ’70s or retro feel, so the chosen fonts add a bit of time period humor. The colored lights are achieved through NeoPixel strips, which are cut into segments and fed into fabric tubes layered with batting behind the iron-on. The batting creates good diffusion allowing all of the letters to be illuminated evenly. Well done, Caitlin’sDad!

The dress gets its power and programming from our FLORA microcontroller. It’s different from most Arduinos because it is round, making it comfortable for wearables. It’s also stitchable with conductive thread, as well as solderable, allowing for more options for connecting to its pins. If you want to learn more about this microcontroller for your wearables projects, check out our tutorial. You will be pleasantly surprised by the array of modules also available for it including GPS sensor, light sensor, color sensor, motion sensor and BLE. It’s never too late to get started. Don’t waste time. Early bird gets the worm…seriously, make some DIY time.


Flora breadboard is 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

Happy New Year 2025
Happy New Year from Adafruit!

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!

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 38,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — New Products 11/15/2024 Featuring Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Charger with 3.3V Buck Board! (Video)

Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Open Hardware is In, New CircuitPython and Pi 5 16GB, and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

Adafruit IoT Monthly — The 2024 Recap Issue!

Maker Business – Adafruit Daily — Same-day delivery, not for convenience, but customer loyalty

Electronics – Adafruit Daily — Level Conversion Hack

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !


No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.